Gotcha: Using Apache Commons StringUtils.isNumeric

StringUtils java class in Apache commons library provides a method isNumeric to check if given sequence of characters contains digits only. But this is not a sure shot way to check for numbers because for a string containing decimal the StringUtils.isNumeric returns false as shown below:

String number = "123";
System.out.println("123 is number? " + StringUtils.isNumeric(number));
//123 is number? true

String decimalNumber = "123.0";
System.out.println("123.0 is number? " + StringUtils.isNumeric(decimalNumber));
//123.0 is number? false

A better approach is to use NumberUtils.isCreatable which adopts a more exhaustive approach to check for numericity of a string as shown below:

System.out.println("123 is number? " + NumberUtils.isCreatable(number));
//123 is number? true
System.out.println("123.0 is number? " + NumberUtils.isCreatable(decimalNumber));
//123.0 is number? true

The same class provides an API createNumber to convert the String into a Number as shown below:

Number decimalNumObj = NumberUtils.createNumber("123.47");

We can then get any desired numeric datatype value from this Number object using its methods like longValue(), doubleValue(), intValue(), shortValue().

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