Best practice to look up Java Enum

Looks like you have a bad practice here but not where you think.

Catching an IllegalArgumentException to rethrow another RuntimeException with a clearer message might look like a good idea but it is not. Because it means you care about messages in your exceptions.

If you care about messages in your exceptions, then it means that your user is somehow seeing your exceptions. This is bad.

If you want to provide an explicit error message to your user, you should check the validity of the enum value when parsing user input and send the appropriate error message in the response if user input is incorrect.

Something like:

// This code uses pure fantasy, you are warned!
class MyApi
{
    // Return the 24-hour from a 12-hour and AM/PM

    void getHour24(Request request, Response response)
    {
        // validate user input
        int nTime12 = 1;
        try
        {
            nTime12 = Integer.parseInt(request.getParam("hour12"));
            if( nTime12 <= 0 || nTime12 > 12 )
            {
                throw new NumberFormatException();
            }
        }
        catch( NumberFormatException e )
        {
            response.setCode(400); // Bad request
            response.setContent("time12 must be an integer between 1 and 12");
            return;
        }

        AMPM pm = null;
        try
        {
            pm = AMPM.lookup(request.getParam("pm"));
        }
        catch( IllegalArgumentException e )
        {
            response.setCode(400); // Bad request
            response.setContent("pm must be one of " + AMPM.values());
            return;
        }

        response.setCode(200);
        switch( pm )
        {
            case AM:
                response.setContent(nTime12);
                break;
            case PM:
                response.setContent(nTime12 + 12);
                break;
        }
        return;
    }
}

Probably you can implement generic static lookup method.

Like so

public class LookupUtil {
   public static <E extends Enum<E>> E lookup(Class<E> e, String id) {   
      try {          
         E result = Enum.valueOf(e, id);
      } catch (IllegalArgumentException e) {
         // log error or something here

         throw new RuntimeException(
           "Invalid value for enum " + e.getSimpleName() + ": " + id);
      }

      return result;
   }
}

Then you can

public enum MyEnum {
   static public MyEnum lookup(String id) {
       return LookupUtil.lookup(MyEnum.class, id);
   }
}

or call explicitly utility class lookup method.