Java: Data Science Made Easy

Validating data types

Sometimes we simply need to validate whether a piece of data is of a specific type, such as integer or floating point data. We will demonstrate in the next example how to validate integer data using the validateInt method. This technique is easily modified for the other major data types supported in the standard Java library, including Float and Double.

We need to use a try-catch block here to catch a NumberFormatException. If an exception is thrown, we know our data is not a valid integer. We first pass our text to be tested to the parseInt method of the Integer class. If the text can be parsed as an integer, we simply print out the integer. If an exception is thrown, we display information to that effect:

 public static ...