What's the best way to check if a String represents an integer in Java?

Question

I normally use the following idiom to check if a String can be converted to an integer.

public boolean isInteger( String input ) {
    try {
        Integer.         


        

Answer 1

This is shorter, but shorter isn't necessarily better (and it won't catch integer values which are out of range, as pointed out in danatel's comment):

input.matches("^-?\\d+$");

Personally, since the implementation is squirrelled away in a helper method and correctness trumps length, I would just go with something like what you have (minus catching the base Exception class rather than NumberFormatException).