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

If you want to check if the string represents an integer that fits in an int type, I did a little modification to the jonas' answer, so that strings that represent integers bigger than Integer.MAX_VALUE or smaller than Integer.MIN_VALUE, will now return false. For example: "3147483647" will return false because 3147483647 is bigger than 2147483647, and likewise, "-2147483649" will also return false because -2147483649 is smaller than -2147483648.

public static boolean isInt(String s) {
  if(s == null) {
    return false;
  }
  s = s.trim(); //Don't get tricked by whitespaces.
  int len = s.length();
  if(len == 0) {
    return false;
  }
  //The bottom limit of an int is -2147483648 which is 11 chars long.
  //[note that the upper limit (2147483647) is only 10 chars long]
  //Thus any string with more than 11 chars, even if represents a valid integer, 
  //it won't fit in an int.
  if(len > 11) {
    return false;
  }
  char c = s.charAt(0);
  int i = 0;
  //I don't mind the plus sign, so "+13" will return true.
  if(c == '-' || c == '+') {
    //A single "+" or "-" is not a valid integer.
    if(len == 1) {
      return false;
    }
    i = 1;
  }
  //Check if all chars are digits
  for(; i < len; i++) {
    c = s.charAt(i);
    if(c < '0' || c > '9') {
      return false;
    }
  }
  //If we reached this point then we know for sure that the string has at
  //most 11 chars and that they're all digits (the first one might be a '+'
  // or '-' thought).
  //Now we just need to check, for 10 and 11 chars long strings, if the numbers
  //represented by the them don't surpass the limits.
  c = s.charAt(0);
  char l;
  String limit;
  if(len == 10 && c != '-' && c != '+') {
    limit = "2147483647";
    //Now we are going to compare each char of the string with the char in
    //the limit string that has the same index, so if the string is "ABC" and
    //the limit string is "DEF" then we are gonna compare A to D, B to E and so on.
    //c is the current string's char and l is the corresponding limit's char
    //Note that the loop only continues if c == l. Now imagine that our string
    //is "2150000000", 2 == 2 (next), 1 == 1 (next), 5 > 4 as you can see,
    //because 5 > 4 we can guarantee that the string will represent a bigger integer.
    //Similarly, if our string was "2139999999", when we find out that 3 < 4,
    //we can also guarantee that the integer represented will fit in an int.
    for(i = 0; i < len; i++) {
      c = s.charAt(i);
      l = limit.charAt(i);
      if(c > l) {
        return false;
      }
      if(c < l) {
        return true;
      }
    }
  }
  c = s.charAt(0);
  if(len == 11) {
    //If the first char is neither '+' nor '-' then 11 digits represent a 
    //bigger integer than 2147483647 (10 digits).
    if(c != '+' && c != '-') {
      return false;
    }
    limit = (c == '-') ? "-2147483648" : "+2147483647";
    //Here we're applying the same logic that we applied in the previous case
    //ignoring the first char.
    for(i = 1; i < len; i++) {
      c = s.charAt(i);
      l = limit.charAt(i);
      if(c > l) {
        return false;
      }
      if(c < l) {
        return true;
      }
    }
  }
  //The string passed all tests, so it must represent a number that fits
  //in an int...
  return true;
}