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

We can try replacing all the numbers from the given string with ("") ie blank space and if after that the length of the string is zero then we can say that given string contains only numbers. Example:

boolean isNumber(String str){
        if(str.length() == 0)
            return false; //To check if string is empty
        
        if(str.charAt(0) == '-')
            str = str.replaceFirst("-","");// for handling -ve numbers
    
        System.out.println(str);
        
        str = str.replaceFirst("\\.",""); //to check if it contains more than one decimal points
        
        if(str.length() == 0)
            return false; // to check if it is empty string after removing -ve sign and decimal point
        System.out.println(str);
        
        return str.replaceAll("[0-9]","").length() == 0;
    }