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 has always been the same, however, the implementation has been different. Some surround a parse attempt with try/catch

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

and others match with regex

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

Is one of these methods better than the other? I personally prefer using the regex approach, as it’s concise, but will it perform on par if called while iterating over, say, a list of a several hundred thousand strings?

Note: As I’m kinda new to the site I don’t fully understand this Community Wiki business, so if this belongs there let me know, and I’ll gladly move it.

EDIT:
With all the TryParse suggestions I ported Asaph’s benchmark code (thanks for a great post!) to C# and added a TryParse method. And as it seems, the TryParse wins hands down. However, the try catch approach took a crazy amount of time. To the point of me thinking I did something wrong! I also updated regex to handle negatives and decimal points.

Results for updated, C# benchmark code:

00:00:51.7390000 for isIntegerParseInt
00:00:03.9110000 for isIntegerRegex
00:00:00.3500000 for isIntegerTryParse

Using:

static bool isIntegerParseInt(string str) {
    try {
        int.Parse(str);
        return true;
    } catch (FormatException e){}
    return false;
}

static bool isIntegerRegex(string str) {
    return Regex.Match(str, "^-?[0-9]+(\\.[0-9]+)?$").Success;
}

static bool isIntegerTryParse(string str) {
    int bob;
    return Int32.TryParse(str, out bob);
}

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<iterations; i++) {
            isIntegerParseInt("123");
            isIntegerParseInt("not an int");
            isIntegerParseInt("-321");
        }
        endtime = System.currentTimeMillis();
        System.out.println("This operation took " + (endtime - starttime) + " ms.");
        starttime = System.currentTimeMillis();
        for (int i=0; i<iterations; i++) {
            isIntegerRegex("123");
            isIntegerRegex("not an int");
            isIntegerRegex("-321");
        }
        endtime = System.currentTimeMillis();
        System.out.println("This operation took " + (endtime - starttime) + " ms.");
    }
}

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