There are very few real use cases in which being able to evaluate a String as a fragment of Java code is necessary or desirable. That is, asking how to do this is really an XY problem: you actually have a different problem, which can be solved a different way.
First ask yourself, where did this String that you wish to evaluate come from? Did another part of your program generate it, or was it input provided by the user?
Another part of my program generated it: so, you want one part of your program to decide the kind of operation to perform, but not perform the operation, and a second part that performs the chosen operation. Instead of generating and then evaluating a String, use the Strategy, Command or Builder design pattern, as appropriate for your particular case.
It is user input: the user could input anything, including commands that, when executed, could cause your program to misbehave, crash, expose information that should be secret, damage persistent information (such as the content of a database), and other such nastiness. The only way to prevent that would be to parse the String yourself, check it was not malicious, and then evaluate it. But parsing it yourself is much of the work that the requested evalfunction would do, so you have saved yourself nothing. Worse still, checking that arbitrary Java was not malicious is impossible, because checking that is the halting problem.
It is user input, but the syntax and semantics of permitted text to evaluate is greatly restricted: No general purpose facility can easily implement a general purpose parser and evaluator for whatever restricted syntax and semantics you have chosen. What you need to do is implement a parser and evaluator for your chosen syntax and semantics. If the task is simple, you could write a simple recursive-descent or finite-state-machine parser by hand. If the task is difficult, you could use a compiler-compiler (such as ANTLR) to do some of the work for you.
I just want to implement a desktop calculator!: A homework assignment, eh? If you could implement the evaluation of the input expression using a provided eval function, it would not be much of a homework assignment, would it? Your program would be three lines long. Your instructor probably expects you to write the code for a simple arithmetic parser/evaluator. There is well known algorithm, shunting-yard, which you might find useful.
