Determine if a String is a number and convert in Java?

Question

I know variants of this question have been asked frequently before (see here and here for instance), but this is not an exact duplicate of those.

I would like to check if a String is a number, and if so I would like to store it as a double. There are several ways to do this, but all of them seem inappropriate for my purposes.

One solution would be to use Double.parseDouble(s) or similarly new BigDecimal(s). However, those solutions don't work if there are commas present (so "1,234" would cause an exception). I could of course strip out all commas before using these techniques, but that would seem to pose loads of problems in other locales.

I looked at Apache Commons NumberUtils.isNumber(s), but that suffers from the same comma issue.

I considered NumberFormat or DecimalFormat, but those seemed far too lenient. For instance, "1A" is formatted to "1" instead of indicating that it's not a number. Furthermore, something like "127.0.0.1" will be counted as the number 127 instead of indicating that it's not a number.

I feel like my requirements aren't so exotic that I'm the first to do this, but none of the solutions does exactly what I need. I suppose even I don't know exactly what I need (otherwise I could write my own parser), but I know the above solutions do not work for the reasons indicated. Does any solution exist, or do I need to figure out precisely what I need and write my own code for it?

Answer 1

Sounds quite weird, but I would try to follow this answer and use java.util.Scanner.

Scanner scanner = new Scanner(input);
if (scanner.hasNextInt())
    System.out.println(scanner.nextInt());
else if (scanner.hasNextDouble())
    System.out.println(scanner.nextDouble());
else
    System.out.println("Not a number");

For inputs such as 1A, 127.0.0.1, 1,234, 6.02e-23 I get the following output:

Not a number
Not a number
1234
6.02E-23

Scanner.useLocale can be used to change to the desired locale.

Answer 2

You can specify the Locale that you need:

NumberFormat nf = NumberFormat.getInstance(Locale.GERMAN);
double myNumber = nf.parse(myString).doubleValue();

This should work in your example since German Locale has commas as decimal separator.

Answer 3

You can use the ParsePosition as a check for complete consumption of the string in a NumberFormat.parse operation. If the string is consumed, then you don't have a "1A" situation. If not, you do and can behave accordingly. See here for a quick outline of the solution and here for the related JDK bug that is closed as wont fix because of the ParsePosition option.

Answer 4

Unfortunately Double.parseDouble(s) or new BigDecimal(s) seem to be your best options.

You cite localisation concerns, but unfortunately there is no way reliably support all locales w/o specification by the user anyway. It is just impossible.

Sometimes you can reason about the scheme used by looking at whether commas or periods are used first, if both are used, but this isn't always possible, so why even try? Better to have a system which you know works reliably in certain situations than try to rely on one which may work in more situations but can also give bad results...

What does the number 123,456 represent? 123456 or 123.456?

Just strip commas, or spaces, or periods, depending on locale specified by user. Default to stripping spaces and commas. If you want to make it stricter, only strip commas OR spaces, not both, and only before the period if there is one. Also should be pretty easy to check manually if they are spaced properly in threes. In fact a custom parser might be easiest here.

Here is a bit of a proof of concept. It's a bit (very) messy but I reckon it works, and you get the idea anyways :).

public class StrictNumberParser {
  public double parse(String numberString) throws NumberFormatException {
    numberString = numberString.trim();
    char[] numberChars = numberString.toCharArray();

    Character separator = null;
    int separatorCount = 0;
    boolean noMoreSeparators = false;
    for (int index = 1; index < numberChars.length; index++) {
      char character = numberChars[index];

      if (noMoreSeparators || separatorCount < 3) {
        if (character == '.') {
          if (separator != null) {
            throw new NumberFormatException();
          } else {
            noMoreSeparators = true;
          }
        } else if (separator == null && (character == ',' || character == ' ')) {
          if (noMoreSeparators) {
            throw new NumberFormatException();
          }
          separator = new Character(character);
          separatorCount = -1;
        } else if (!Character.isDigit(character)) {
          throw new NumberFormatException();
        }

        separatorCount++;
      } else {
        if (character == '.') {
          noMoreSeparators = true;
        } else if (separator == null) {
          if (Character.isDigit(character)) {
            noMoreSeparators = true;
          } else if (character == ',' || character == ' ') {
            separator = new Character(character);
          } else {
            throw new NumberFormatException();
          }
        } else if (!separator.equals(character)) {
          throw new NumberFormatException();
        }

        separatorCount = 0;
      }
    }

    if (separator != null) {
      if (!noMoreSeparators && separatorCount != 3) {
        throw new NumberFormatException();
      }
      numberString = numberString.replaceAll(separator.toString(), "");
    }

    return Double.parseDouble(numberString);
  }

  public void testParse(String testString) {
    try {
      System.out.println("result: " + parse(testString));
    } catch (NumberFormatException e) {
      System.out.println("Couldn't parse number!");
    }
  }

  public static void main(String[] args) {
    StrictNumberParser p = new StrictNumberParser();
    p.testParse("123 45.6");
    p.testParse("123 4567.8");
    p.testParse("123 4567");
    p.testParse("12 45");
    p.testParse("123 456 45");
    p.testParse("345.562,346");
    p.testParse("123 456,789");
    p.testParse("123,456,789");
    p.testParse("123 456 789.52");
    p.testParse("23,456,789");
    p.testParse("3,456,789");
    p.testParse("123 456.12");
    p.testParse("1234567.8");
  }
}

EDIT: obviously this would need to be extended for recognising scientific notation, but this should be simple enough, especially as you don't have to actually validate anything after the e, you can just let parseDouble fail if it is badly formed.

Also might be a good idea to properly extend NumberFormat with this. have a getSeparator() for parsed numbers and a setSeparator for giving desired output format... This sort of takes care of localisation, but again more work would need to be done to support ',' for decimals...