How to check if a String is numeric in Java

Question

How would you check if a String was a number before parsing it?

Answer 1

As @CraigTP had mentioned in his excellent answer, I also have similar performance concerns on using Exceptions to test whether the string is numerical or not. So I end up splitting the string and use java.lang.Character.isDigit().

public static boolean isNumeric(String str)
{
    for (char c : str.toCharArray())
    {
        if (!Character.isDigit(c)) return false;
    }
    return true;
}

According to the Javadoc, Character.isDigit(char) will correctly recognizes non-Latin digits. Performance-wise, I think a simple N number of comparisons where N is the number of characters in the string would be more computationally efficient than doing a regex matching.

UPDATE: As pointed by Jean-François Corbett in the comment, the above code would only validate positive integers, which covers the majority of my use case. Below is the updated code that correctly validates decimal numbers according to the default locale used in your system, with the assumption that decimal separator only occur once in the string.

public static boolean isStringNumeric( String str )
{
    DecimalFormatSymbols currentLocaleSymbols = DecimalFormatSymbols.getInstance();
    char localeMinusSign = currentLocaleSymbols.getMinusSign();

    if ( !Character.isDigit( str.charAt( 0 ) ) && str.charAt( 0 ) != localeMinusSign ) return false;

    boolean isDecimalSeparatorFound = false;
    char localeDecimalSeparator = currentLocaleSymbols.getDecimalSeparator();

    for ( char c : str.substring( 1 ).toCharArray() )
    {
        if ( !Character.isDigit( c ) )
        {
            if ( c == localeDecimalSeparator && !isDecimalSeparatorFound )
            {
                isDecimalSeparatorFound = true;
                continue;
            }
            return false;
        }
    }
    return true;
}