Deciding whether value returned in NUMERIC or STRING.?

Question

I have a small query.
I am reading values from differnt columns in a record.
I have no idea which column contains a String value or which
contains a numeric value.
How do I check whether the value I receive is numeric
My code is:
myTable.getValueAt(int row,int col)
Now here,I would like to check whether the value received is numeric
or String
if(myTable.getValue(0,0)) IS NUMERIC {..then do something....
else if (myTable.getValue(0,0) =  "STRING" {
}Any suggestions please? No offence

Answer 1

Here's a general purpose function to see if a string "looks lke" a number://---------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Determines if a string contains only digits, decimal points & hyphens.
* @param string The string to check.
* @return <code>True</code> if it has only digits, else <code>false</code>.
* @since J2SE 1.4
static public boolean isNumeric(String string)
   return string.matches("^[-+]?\\d+(\\.\\d+)?$");
}However, it doesn't really tell you whether a string represents a number or not. That completely depends on how your program interprets it. For example, is a postal codde a number or a string? It has digits, but you wouldn't want to perform arithmetic on it.
The issue of whether a string should be interpreteted as a number is more a design decision than a concern of the Java language. That's a long answer to the question. Hope it's intelligible.