You could use a regular expression.
return str.matches("\\d+");
won't work for negative numbers, though.
You could also use Integer.parseInt and catch the NumberFormatException and return true/false accordingly.
Or, you should not break the first digit you find, as you need to check all characters, only until you find one that is not a digit. Again, this does not capture negative numbers
public boolean isInteger(String str) {
if(str == null || str.trim().isEmpty()) {
return false;
}
for (int i = 0; i < str.length(); i++) {
if(!Character.isDigit(str.charAt(i))) {
return false;
}
}
return true;
}
Personally, option 2 is the best, but your instructions seem to imply that you need to iterate over character values
Answer from OneCricketeer on Stack OverflowYou could use a regular expression.
return str.matches("\\d+");
won't work for negative numbers, though.
You could also use Integer.parseInt and catch the NumberFormatException and return true/false accordingly.
Or, you should not break the first digit you find, as you need to check all characters, only until you find one that is not a digit. Again, this does not capture negative numbers
public boolean isInteger(String str) {
if(str == null || str.trim().isEmpty()) {
return false;
}
for (int i = 0; i < str.length(); i++) {
if(!Character.isDigit(str.charAt(i))) {
return false;
}
}
return true;
}
Personally, option 2 is the best, but your instructions seem to imply that you need to iterate over character values
Just check if Integer.parseInt throws exception or not.
try {
Integer.parseInt(string);
} catch (NumberFormatException e) {
return false;
}
return true;
The most naive way would be to iterate over the String and make sure all the elements are valid digits for the given radix. This is about as efficient as it could possibly get, since you must look at each element at least once. I suppose we could micro-optimize it based on the radix, but for all intents and purposes this is as good as you can expect to get.
public static boolean isInteger(String s) {
return isInteger(s,10);
}
public static boolean isInteger(String s, int radix) {
if(s.isEmpty()) return false;
for(int i = 0; i < s.length(); i++) {
if(i == 0 && s.charAt(i) == '-') {
if(s.length() == 1) return false;
else continue;
}
if(Character.digit(s.charAt(i),radix) < 0) return false;
}
return true;
}
Alternatively, you can rely on the Java library to have this. It's not exception based, and will catch just about every error condition you can think of. It will be a little more expensive (you have to create a Scanner object, which in a critically-tight loop you don't want to do. But it generally shouldn't be too much more expensive, so for day-to-day operations it should be pretty reliable.
public static boolean isInteger(String s, int radix) {
Scanner sc = new Scanner(s.trim());
if(!sc.hasNextInt(radix)) return false;
// we know it starts with a valid int, now make sure
// there's nothing left!
sc.nextInt(radix);
return !sc.hasNext();
}
If best practices don't matter to you, or you want to troll the guy who does your code reviews, try this on for size:
public static boolean isInteger(String s) {
try {
Integer.parseInt(s);
} catch(NumberFormatException e) {
return false;
} catch(NullPointerException e) {
return false;
}
// only got here if we didn't return false
return true;
}
It's better to use regular expression like this:
str.matches("-?\\d+");
-? --> negative sign, could have none or one
\\d+ --> one or more digits
It is not good to use NumberFormatException here if you can use if-statement instead.
If you don't want leading zero's, you can just use the regular expression as follow:
str.matches("-?(0|[1-9]\\d*)");
How to check whether a String input is totally numeric
Can anyone help me figure out how to check if an input is a number if the input is a String?
How can I check if a String is an integer in Java? - LambdaTest Community
java - Determine if an input is an integer, a double or a String - Code Review Stack Exchange
Videos
If I use a scanner to get a String input and do
Integer.parseInt(String);
it will return the string as an integer as long as it's numeric. If it's not totally numeric, I get a NumberFormatException error. What I want is for it to check whether the input is numeric, changing the value of a boolean to false if it's not, instead of giving me an error.
I know it'll involve use of a while loop but I'm not sure what else to do.
I'm writing a plugin for a Bukkit server at the moment and I'm trying to check to see if coordinates in a player command are valid, however commands are Strings (saved in an array as args[0] for the first word, args[1] for the second etc) and I'm not sure how I'd tell if args[x] is a number.
After that I'd just convert args[x] into an integer and work out things from that but it's the initial checking of the input which is confusing me.
Any help is much appreciated, thanks heaps!! :)
I don't like the throwing and catching of Exceptions
This can be made much cleaner with the use of a Scanner. It might not be the most performant way, but it's fast and easy to use.
try (Scanner scanner = new Scanner(x)) {
if (scanner.hasNextInt()) doFoo(scanner.nextInt());
else if (scanner.hasNextDouble()) doFoo(scanner.nextDouble());
else doFoo(x);
}
However, if this is going to be called hundreds of thousands of times, the try catch method might be faster, though you should encapsulate those into their own functions. You'd need to profile to be sure which is faster, but I believe it would be this because Scanner.hasNextFoo uses regular expressions:
public static boolean isInteger(String str) {
try {
Integer.parse(str);
return true;
} catch (NumberFormatException e) {
return false;
}
}
Also, your function is doing multiple things: printing/reporting, and parsing/forwarding to doFoo. This is not a good thing. I'd recommend removing those and handling them where it's more appropriate:
public static void testString(String val) {
String x = val.trim();
try (Scanner scanner = new Scanner(x)) {
if (scanner.hasNextInt()) doFoo(scanner.nextInt());
else if (scanner.hasNextDouble()) doFoo(scanner.nextDouble());
else doFoo(x);
}
}
That was much shorter. Now if you wanted the same functionality, it would look like so:
public static void testTestString(String val) {
System.out.print("Original '" + val + "' ");
testString(val);
}
// ...
public static void doFoo(int i) {
System.out.println("It's an integer: " + i);
// ...
}
If you want your code to be extremely extensible, there is another way. Notice how the new function I suggested still does multiple things:
- It detects the type of the string
- It parses the value from the string
- It forwards the value on to another function
We can separate these into their own components.
This is only really worth it if you can foresee adding types to be a common feature, but especially if the "another function" you forward to should be selectable by the user (say, if you packaged these functions as member functions of an object):
// Class is the easiest type we can return
private static Class<?> determineType(String val) {
try (Scanner scanner = new Scanner(val)) {
if (scanner.hasNextInt()) return Integer.class;
if (scanner.hasNextDouble()) return Double.class;
return String.class;
}
}
private static final Map<Class<?>, Function<String, ?>> parsers = new IdentityHashMap<>();
private static final Map<Class<?>, Consumer<Object>> functionSwitch = new IdentityHashMap<>();
static {
parsers.put(Integer.class, Integer::parseInt);
parsers.put(Double.class, Double::parseDouble);
parsers.put(String.class, Function.identity());
// Note that, due to limitations in the type system,
// i is of type Object, so we need to cast it to the appropriate
// class before forwarding on to the function.
functionSwitch.put(Integer.class, i -> doFoo((Integer) i));
functionSwitch.put(Double.class, d -> doFoo((Double) d));
functionSwitch.put(String.class, str -> doFoo((String) str));
}
public static void testString(String val) {
val = val.trim(); // This could even be part of the parser's responsibility
Class<?> stringType = determineType(val);
Function<String, ?> parser = parsers.get(stringType);
functionSwitch.get(stringType).accept(parser.apply(val));
}
Background
This question was brought to my attention in The 2nd Monitor chat room because in the past I have claimed that using exception handling to handle parse exceptions is "a bad idea and slow". This is exactly what your code is doing, and it's a bad idea, and slow.... at least, that's what I thought, until I benchmarked your code.
Now, in the past, I wrote a CSV parser and it used a similar system to yours to handle the values in a field, and I discovered that I got a significant speed-up (like 100% faster) when I prevalidated the values to an large extent, before doing a parseInt or parseDouble on them. I found that it is much better to "identify" a value of a certain type to a high degree of confidence, and thus reduce the number of exceptions thrown.
In your code, if the values are 1/3 integers, 1/3 double, and 1/3 string, then on average you are creating 1 exception for each value (none for ints, 1 for doubles, and 2 for strings). Worst case, if all your values are strings, you'll create 2 exceptions per value.
What if you could (almost) guarantee that all your parseInt and parseDouble calls will succeed, and you'll have (almost) no exceptions? Is the work to check the value "worth it"?
My claim is yes, it's worth it.
So, I have tried to prove it, and ... the results are interesting.
I used my MicroBench performance system to run the benchmark, and I built a dummy "load" for the doFoo function. Let's look at my test-rig:
public class ParseVal {
private final LongAdder intsums = new LongAdder();
private final DoubleAdder doubsums = new DoubleAdder();
private final LongAdder stringsums = new LongAdder();
private final void doFoo(int val) {
intsums.add(val);
}
private final void doFoo(double val) {
doubsums.add(val);
}
private final void doFoo(String val) {
stringsums.add(val.length());
}
@Override
public String toString() {
return String.format("IntSum %d - DoubleSum %.9f - StringLen %d", intsums.longValue(), doubsums.doubleValue(), stringsums.longValue());
}
public static final String testFunction(BiConsumer<ParseVal, String> fn, String[] data) {
ParseVal pv = new ParseVal();
for (String v : data) {
fn.accept(pv, v);
}
return pv.toString();
}
public static final String[] testData(int count) {
String[] data = new String[count];
Random rand = new Random(count);
for (int i = 0; i < count; i++) {
String base = String.valueOf(1000000000 - rand.nextInt(2000000000));
switch(i % 3) {
case 0:
break;
case 1:
base += "." + rand.nextInt(10000);
break;
case 2:
base += "foobar";
break;
}
data[i] = base;
}
return data;
}
.......
public void testStringOP(String val) {
String x = val.trim();
try {
int i = Integer.parseInt(x);
doFoo(i);
} catch (NumberFormatException e) {
try {
double d = Double.parseDouble(x);
doFoo(d);
} catch (NumberFormatException e2) {
doFoo(x);
}
}
}
public static void main(String[] args) {
String[] data = testData(1000);
String expect = testFunction((pv, v) -> pv.testStringOP(v), data);
System.out.println(expect);
....
}
}
The doFoo methods have an accumulator mechanism (adding up ints, doubles, and the string lengths) and making the results available in a toString method.
Also, I have put your function in there as testStringOP.
There is a testData function which builds an array if input strings where there are approximately equal numbers of int, double, and string values.
Finally, the benchmark function:
public static final String testFunction(BiConsumer<ParseVal, String> fn, String[] data) {
ParseVal pv = new ParseVal();
for (String v : data) {
fn.accept(pv, v);
}
return pv.toString();
}
That function takes an input function and the test data as an argument, and returns the String summary as a result. You would use this function like it's used in the main method....
String expect = testFunction((pv, v) -> pv.testStringOP(v), data);
which runs the testStringOP function on all the input data values, and returns the accumulated string results.
What's nice is that I can now create other functions to test performance, for example testStringMyFn and call:
String myresult = testFunction((pv, v) -> pv.testStringMyFn(v), data);
This is the basic tool I can use for the MicroBench system: https://github.com/rolfl/MicroBench
Scanner option
Let's start by comparing your function to the Scanner type system recommended in another answer... Here's the code I used for the Scanner:
public void testStringScanner(String val) {
val = val.trim();
try (Scanner scanner = new Scanner(val)) {
if (scanner.hasNextInt()) {
doFoo(scanner.nextInt());
} else if (scanner.hasNextDouble()) {
doFoo(scanner.nextDouble());
} else {
doFoo(val);
}
}
}
and here's how I benchmarked that code:
public static void main(String[] args) {
String[] data = testData(1000);
String expect = testFunction((pv, v) -> pv.testStringOP(v), data);
System.out.println(expect);
UBench bench = new UBench("IntDoubleString Parser")
.addTask("OP", () -> testFunction((pv, v) -> pv.testStringOP(v), data), s -> expect.equals(s))
.addTask("Scanner", () -> testFunction((pv, v) -> pv.testStringScanner(v), data), s -> expect.equals(s));
bench.press(10).report("Warmup");
bench.press(100).report("Final");
}
That runs the benchmark on both your function, and the Scanner function, and does a warmup run (to get JIT optimzations done), and a "Final" run to get real results.... what are the results, you ask?
Task IntDoubleString Parser -> OP: (Unit: MILLISECONDS) Count : 100 Average : 1.6914 Fastest : 1.5331 Slowest : 3.2561 95Pctile : 2.0277 99Pctile : 3.2561 TimeBlock : 1.794 2.037 1.674 1.654 1.674 1.588 1.665 1.588 1.634 1.606 Histogram : 99 1 Task IntDoubleString Parser -> Scanner: (Unit: MILLISECONDS) Count : 100 Average : 69.9713 Fastest : 67.2338 Slowest : 98.4322 95Pctile : 73.8073 99Pctile : 98.4322 TimeBlock : 77.028 70.050 69.325 69.860 69.094 68.498 68.547 68.779 69.586 68.945 Histogram : 100
What does that mean? It means, on average, your code is 40-times faster than the Scanner. Your code runs in 1.7Milliseconds to process 1000 input values, and the scanner runs in 70 milliseconds.
So, a Scanner is a bad idea if performance is required, right? I agree.
Alternative
But, what about a RegEx pre-validation check? Note that the regex will not guarantee a clean parse, but it can go a long way. For example, the regex [+-]?\d+ will match any integer, right, but is -999999999999999999999 a valid integer? No, it's too big. But, it is a valid double. We will still need to have a try/catch block even if we pass the regex prevalidation. That's going to eliminate almost all exceptions, though....
So, what do we do to prevalidate things? Well, the Double.valueOf(String) function documents a regex for matching double values in Strings. It's complicated, and I made a few modifications because we don't have already trimmed our inputs, but here's a couple of patterns for prevalidating double values, and integer values:
private static final String Digits = "(\\p{Digit}+)";
private static final String HexDigits = "(\\p{XDigit}+)";
private static final String Exp = "[eE][+-]?"+Digits;
private static final String fpRegex =
( //"[\\x00-\\x20]*"+ // Optional leading "whitespace"
"[+-]?(" + // Optional sign character
"NaN|" + // "NaN" string
"Infinity|" + // "Infinity" string
"((("+Digits+"(\\.)?("+Digits+"?)("+Exp+")?)|"+
"(\\.("+Digits+")("+Exp+")?)|"+
"((" +
"(0[xX]" + HexDigits + "(\\.)?)|" +
"(0[xX]" + HexDigits + "?(\\.)" + HexDigits + ")" +
")[pP][+-]?" + Digits + "))" +
"[fFdD]?))"); // +
//"[\\x00-\\x20]*");// Optional trailing "whitespace"
Pattern isDouble = Pattern.compile(fpRegex);
Pattern isInteger = Pattern.compile("[+-]?[0-9]+");
We can use those functions to build the code:
public void testStringRegex(String val) {
String x = val.trim();
if (isInteger.matcher(x).matches()) {
try {
doFoo(Integer.parseInt(x));
} catch (NumberFormatException nfe) {
try {
doFoo(Double.parseDouble(x));
} catch (NumberFormatException e) {
doFoo(x);
}
}
} else if (isDouble.matcher(x).matches()) {
try {
doFoo(Double.parseDouble(x));
} catch (NumberFormatException e) {
doFoo(x);
}
} else {
doFoo(x);
}
}
Now, that's pretty complicated, right? Well, it does a "quick" integer regex check, and if it's likely an integer, it tries to parse it as an integer, and fails over to a double, and then to a string....
If it's not likely an integer, it checks if it's a double, and so on.....
How can this code be faster, you ask? Well, we're almost certainly having clean parses when we do them, and we'll have almost no exceptions... But, is it actually faster?
Here are the results:
Task IntDoubleString Parser -> OP: (Unit: MILLISECONDS) Count : 100 Average : 1.6689 Fastest : 1.5580 Slowest : 2.1572 95Pctile : 1.8012 99Pctile : 2.1572 TimeBlock : 1.695 1.752 1.709 1.670 1.641 1.648 1.643 1.639 1.662 1.630 Histogram : 100 Task IntDoubleString Parser -> Regex: (Unit: MILLISECONDS) Count : 100 Average : 1.9580 Fastest : 1.8379 Slowest : 2.5713 95Pctile : 2.1004 99Pctile : 2.5713 TimeBlock : 1.978 2.022 1.949 1.966 2.020 1.933 1.890 1.940 1.955 1.928 Histogram : 100 Task IntDoubleString Parser -> Scanner: (Unit: MILLISECONDS) Count : 100 Average : 69.8886 Fastest : 67.1848 Slowest : 77.2769 95Pctile : 71.9153 99Pctile : 77.2769 TimeBlock : 70.940 69.735 69.879 69.381 69.579 69.180 69.611 70.412 70.123 70.045 Histogram : 100
If you look, you'll see the regex version is Slower than the exception version... it runs in 1.95ms but the exception version runs in 1.67ms
Exceptions
But, there's a catch. In these tests, the stack trace for the exceptions is really small... and the "cost" of an exception depends on the depth of the trace, so let's increase the stack depths for the regex and exception code. Well add a recursive function to simulate a deeper stack:
public void testStringDeepOP(String val, int depth) {
if (depth <= 0) {
testStringOP(val);
} else {
testStringDeepOP(val, depth - 1);
}
}
public void testStringDeepRegex(String val, int depth) {
if (depth <= 0) {
testStringRegex(val);
} else {
testStringDeepRegex(val, depth - 1);
}
}
and we will test the OP and Regex code a different "depths" of nesting, 5, 10, and 20 layers deep. The benchmark code is:
UBench bench = new UBench("IntDoubleString Parser")
.addTask("OP", () -> testFunction((pv, v) -> pv.testStringOP(v), data), s -> expect.equals(s))
.addTask("OP D5", () -> testFunction((pv, v) -> pv.testStringDeepOP(v, 5), data), s -> expect.equals(s))
.addTask("OP D10", () -> testFunction((pv, v) -> pv.testStringDeepOP(v, 10), data), s -> expect.equals(s))
.addTask("OP D20", () -> testFunction((pv, v) -> pv.testStringDeepOP(v, 20), data), s -> expect.equals(s))
.addTask("Regex", () -> testFunction((pv, v) -> pv.testStringRegex(v), data), s -> expect.equals(s))
.addTask("Regex D5", () -> testFunction((pv, v) -> pv.testStringDeepRegex(v, 5), data), s -> expect.equals(s))
.addTask("Regex D10", () -> testFunction((pv, v) -> pv.testStringDeepRegex(v, 10), data), s -> expect.equals(s))
.addTask("Regex D20", () -> testFunction((pv, v) -> pv.testStringDeepRegex(v, 20), data), s -> expect.equals(s))
.addTask("Scanner", () -> testFunction((pv, v) -> pv.testStringScanner(v), data), s -> expect.equals(s));
bench.press(10).report("Warmup");
bench.press(100).report("Final");
What are the results?
Final ===== Task IntDoubleString Parser -> OP: (Unit: MILLISECONDS) Count : 100 Average : 1.7005 Fastest : 1.5260 Slowest : 3.9813 95Pctile : 1.9346 99Pctile : 3.9813 TimeBlock : 1.682 1.624 1.612 1.675 1.708 1.658 1.727 1.738 1.672 1.910 Histogram : 99 1 Task IntDoubleString Parser -> OP D5: (Unit: MILLISECONDS) Count : 100 Average : 1.9288 Fastest : 1.7325 Slowest : 4.9673 95Pctile : 2.0897 99Pctile : 4.9673 TimeBlock : 2.124 1.812 1.828 1.873 1.925 1.877 1.855 1.869 1.903 2.221 Histogram : 98 2 Task IntDoubleString Parser -> OP D10: (Unit: MILLISECONDS) Count : 100 Average : 2.2271 Fastest : 2.0171 Slowest : 4.7395 95Pctile : 2.4904 99Pctile : 4.7395 TimeBlock : 2.392 2.125 2.129 2.152 2.246 2.169 2.189 2.203 2.247 2.420 Histogram : 98 2 Task IntDoubleString Parser -> OP D20: (Unit: MILLISECONDS) Count : 100 Average : 2.9278 Fastest : 2.6838 Slowest : 6.3169 95Pctile : 3.2415 99Pctile : 6.3169 TimeBlock : 2.870 2.822 2.860 2.794 2.956 2.861 3.041 3.012 2.853 3.211 Histogram : 99 1 Task IntDoubleString Parser -> Regex: (Unit: MILLISECONDS) Count : 100 Average : 2.0739 Fastest : 1.9338 Slowest : 3.8368 95Pctile : 2.2744 99Pctile : 3.8368 TimeBlock : 2.229 2.083 2.034 2.013 2.021 2.004 2.013 2.096 2.059 2.186 Histogram : 100 Task IntDoubleString Parser -> Regex D5: (Unit: MILLISECONDS) Count : 100 Average : 2.0565 Fastest : 1.9377 Slowest : 3.2857 95Pctile : 2.2646 99Pctile : 3.2857 TimeBlock : 2.148 2.075 2.035 2.038 2.035 2.031 2.026 2.000 2.032 2.145 Histogram : 100 Task IntDoubleString Parser -> Regex D10: (Unit: MILLISECONDS) Count : 100 Average : 2.0647 Fastest : 1.9598 Slowest : 2.6360 95Pctile : 2.2906 99Pctile : 2.6360 TimeBlock : 2.073 2.094 2.051 2.048 2.072 2.029 2.057 2.124 2.057 2.042 Histogram : 100 Task IntDoubleString Parser -> Regex D20: (Unit: MILLISECONDS) Count : 100 Average : 2.0891 Fastest : 1.9930 Slowest : 2.6483 95Pctile : 2.2587 99Pctile : 2.6483 TimeBlock : 2.108 2.070 2.078 2.066 2.071 2.091 2.048 2.090 2.137 2.132 Histogram : 100 Task IntDoubleString Parser -> Scanner: (Unit: MILLISECONDS) Count : 100 Average : 71.7199 Fastest : 67.9621 Slowest : 152.0714 95Pctile : 75.2141 99Pctile : 152.0714 TimeBlock : 71.006 69.896 70.160 69.734 70.824 69.854 71.473 71.888 73.607 78.756 Histogram : 99 1
Here it is expressed as a table (using the average times):
0 5 10 20 OP 1.7005 1.9288 2.2271 2.9278 RegEx 2.0739 2.0565 2.0647 2.0891
Conclusion
So, that's the real problem with exceptions, the performance is unpredictable... and, for example, if you run it inside a Tomcat container, with stacks hundreds of levels deep, you may find this completely destroys your performance.