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

public static boolean isNumeric(String str)
{
    return str.matches("-?\\d+(.\\d+)?");
}

CraigTP's regular expression (shown above) produces some false positives. E.g. "23y4" will be counted as a number because '.' matches any character not the decimal point.

Also it will reject any number with a leading '+'

An alternative which avoids these two minor problems is

public static boolean isNumeric(String str)
{
    return str.matches("[+-]?\\d*(\\.\\d+)?");
}

Answer 2

Exceptions are expensive, but in this case the RegEx takes much longer. The code below shows a simple test of two functions -- one using exceptions and one using regex. On my machine the RegEx version is 10 times slower than the exception.

import java.util.Date;


public class IsNumeric {

public static boolean isNumericOne(String s) {
    return s.matches("-?\\d+(\\.\\d+)?");  //match a number with optional '-' and decimal.      
}

public static boolean isNumericTwo(String s) {
    try {
        Double.parseDouble(s);
        return true;
    } catch (Exception e) {
        return false;
    }
}

public static void main(String [] args) {

    String test = "12345.F";

    long before = new Date().getTime();     
    for(int x=0;x<1000000;++x) {
        //isNumericTwo(test);
        isNumericOne(test);
    }
    long after = new Date().getTime();

    System.out.println(after-before);

}

}

Answer 3

Google's Guava library provides a nice helper method to do this: Ints.tryParse. You use it like Integer.parseInt but it returns null rather than throw an Exception if the string does not parse to a valid integer. Note that it returns Integer, not int, so you have to convert/autobox it back to int.

Example:

String s1 = "22";
String s2 = "22.2";
Integer oInt1 = Ints.tryParse(s1);
Integer oInt2 = Ints.tryParse(s2);

int i1 = -1;
if (oInt1 != null) {
    i1 = oInt1.intValue();
}
int i2 = -1;
if (oInt2 != null) {
    i2 = oInt2.intValue();
}

System.out.println(i1);  // prints 22
System.out.println(i2);  // prints -1

However, as of the current release -- Guava r11 -- it is still marked @Beta.

I haven't benchmarked it. Looking at the source code there is some overhead from a lot of sanity checking but in the end they use Character.digit(string.charAt(idx)), similar, but slightly different from, the answer from @Ibrahim above. There is no exception handling overhead under the covers in their implementation.

Answer 4

Do not use Exceptions to validate your values. Use Util libs instead like apache NumberUtils:

NumberUtils.isNumber(myStringValue);

Edit:

Please notice that, if your string starts with an 0, NumberUtils will interpret your value as hexadecimal.

NumberUtils.isNumber("07") //true
NumberUtils.isNumber("08") //false

Answer 5

This is generally done with a simple user-defined function (i.e. Roll-your-own "isNumeric" function).

Something like:

public static boolean isNumeric(String str) { 
  try {  
    Double.parseDouble(str);  
    return true;
  } catch(NumberFormatException e){  
    return false;  
  }  
}

However, if you're calling this function a lot, and you expect many of the checks to fail due to not being a number then performance of this mechanism will not be great, since you're relying upon exceptions being thrown for each failure, which is a fairly expensive operation.

An alternative approach may be to use a regular expression to check for validity of being a number:

public static boolean isNumeric(String str) {
  return str.matches("-?\\d+(\\.\\d+)?");  //match a number with optional '-' and decimal.
}

Be careful with the above RegEx mechanism, though, as it will fail if you're using non-Arabic digits (i.e. numerals other than 0 through to 9). This is because the "\d" part of the RegEx will only match [0-9] and effectively isn't internationally numerically aware. (Thanks to OregonGhost for pointing this out!)

Or even another alternative is to use Java's built-in java.text.NumberFormat object to see if, after parsing the string the parser position is at the end of the string. If it is, we can assume the entire string is numeric:

public static boolean isNumeric(String str) {
  NumberFormat formatter = NumberFormat.getInstance();
  ParsePosition pos = new ParsePosition(0);
  formatter.parse(str, pos);
  return str.length() == pos.getIndex();
}

Answer 6

Based off of other answers I wrote my own and it doesn't use patterns or parsing with exception checking.

It checks for a maximum of one minus sign and checks for a maximum of one decimal point.

Here are some examples and their results:

"1", "-1", "-1.5" and "-1.556" return true

"1..5", "1A.5", "1.5D", "-" and "--1" return false

Note: If needed you can modify this to accept a Locale parameter and pass that into the DecimalFormatSymbols.getInstance() calls to use a specific Locale instead of the current one.

 public static boolean isNumeric(final String input) {
    //Check for null or blank string
    if(input == null || input.isBlank()) return false;

    //Retrieve the minus sign and decimal separator characters from the current Locale
    final var localeMinusSign = DecimalFormatSymbols.getInstance().getMinusSign();
    final var localeDecimalSeparator = DecimalFormatSymbols.getInstance().getDecimalSeparator();

    //Check if first character is a minus sign
    final var isNegative = input.charAt(0) == localeMinusSign;
    //Check if string is not just a minus sign
    if (isNegative && input.length() == 1) return false;

    var isDecimalSeparatorFound = false;

    //If the string has a minus sign ignore the first character
    final var startCharIndex = isNegative ? 1 : 0;

    //Check if each character is a number or a decimal separator
    //and make sure string only has a maximum of one decimal separator
    for (var i = startCharIndex; i < input.length(); i++) {
        if(!Character.isDigit(input.charAt(i))) {
            if(input.charAt(i) == localeDecimalSeparator && !isDecimalSeparatorFound) {
                isDecimalSeparatorFound = true;
            } else return false;
        }
    }
    return true;
}