Question

I am parsing XML files and I have several methods similar to:

public static Integer getInteger(Object integer) {
  if (integer == null) {
     return 0;
  }

  try {
     return Integer.parseInt(integer.toString(), 10);
  } catch (Exception ex) {
     return 0;
  }
}

So basically, you pass an object in with the assumption of converting it to an Integer (I also have versions for Float, etc).

This seems to work well but being a Java newbie, I was wondering how you would improve it. I am especially interesting in the boxing/unboxing aspect (at least, from a C# developer’s perspective).

Thanks

EDIT

Sorry, I wasn’t clear to what goes into the method. Yes, it’s for an XML file now so it’s always a string. But the string could be empty or maybe even null. I guess I wanted to always return a 0 if there was an error of any kind.

Answer 1

You don’t say whether integer is an instance of Integer or not. If it is you can just cast it:

Integer i = (Integer) integer;

having checked for null and instanceof first.

If it is not an instance of Integer then what you’re doing seems reasonable, although you only need to catch a NumberFormatException.