Best implementation for an isNumber(string) method

Question

In my limited experience, I\'ve been on several projects that have had some sort of string utility class with methods to determine if a given string is a number. The idea h

Answer 1

I just ran some benchmarks on the performance of these 2 methods (On Macbook Pro OSX Leopard Java 6). ParseInt is faster. Here is the output:

This operation took 1562 ms.
This operation took 2251 ms.

And here is my benchmark code:

public class IsIntegerPerformanceTest {

    public static boolean isIntegerParseInt(String str) {
        try {
            Integer.parseInt(str);
            return true;
        } catch (NumberFormatException nfe) {}
        return false;
    }

    public static boolean isIntegerRegex(String str) {
        return str.matches("^[0-9]+$");
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        long starttime, endtime;
        int iterations = 1000000;
        starttime = System.currentTimeMillis();
        for (int i=0; i

Also, note that your regex will reject negative numbers and the parseInt method will accept them.