Most elegant way to detect if a String is a number?

Question

Is there a better, more elegant (and/or possibly faster) way than

boolean isNumber = false;
try{
   Double.valueOf(myNumber);
   isNumber = true;
} catch (Nu         


        

Answer 1

You could use a regex, i.e. something like String.matches("^[\\d\\-\\.]+$"); (if you're not testing for negative numbers or floating point numbers you could simplify a bit).

Not sure whether that would be faster than the method you outlined though.

Edit: in the light of all this controversy, I decided to make a test and get some data about how fast each of these methods were. Not so much the correctness, but just how quickly they ran.

You can read about my results on my blog. (Hint: Jon Skeet FTW).