Java – Check if null Boolean is true results in exception

It depends on the JUnit version and what assert libraries you use.

• For JUnit5 and 4.13 see answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/2935935/2986984
• If you use assertJ or google-truth, see answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/41019785/2986984

The original answer for JUnit <= 4.12 was:

@Test(expected = IndexOutOfBoundsException.class)
public void testIndexOutOfBoundsException() {

    ArrayList emptyList = new ArrayList();
    Object o = emptyList.get(0);

}

Though answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/31826781/2986984 has more options for JUnit <= 4.12.

Reference :

• JUnit Test-FAQ

This is generally done with a simple user-defined function (i.e. Roll-your-own "isNumeric" function).

Something like:

public static boolean isNumeric(String str) { 
  try {  
    Double.parseDouble(str);  
    return true;
  } catch(NumberFormatException e){  
    return false;  
  }  
}

However, if you're calling this function a lot, and you expect many of the checks to fail due to not being a number then performance of this mechanism will not be great, since you're relying upon exceptions being thrown for each failure, which is a fairly expensive operation.

An alternative approach may be to use a regular expression to check for validity of being a number:

public static boolean isNumeric(String str) {
  return str.matches("-?\\d+(\\.\\d+)?");  //match a number with optional '-' and decimal.
}

Be careful with the above RegEx mechanism, though, as it will fail if you're using non-Arabic digits (i.e. numerals other than 0 through to 9). This is because the "\d" part of the RegEx will only match [0-9] and effectively isn't internationally numerically aware. (Thanks to OregonGhost for pointing this out!)

Or even another alternative is to use Java's built-in java.text.NumberFormat object to see if, after parsing the string the parser position is at the end of the string. If it is, we can assume the entire string is numeric:

public static boolean isNumeric(String str) {
  ParsePosition pos = new ParsePosition(0);
  NumberFormat.getInstance().parse(str, pos);
  return str.length() == pos.getIndex();
}