Groovy – How to compare the string

Use the toInteger() method to convert a String to an Integer, e.g.

int value = "99".toInteger()

An alternative, which avoids using a deprecated method (see below) is

int value = "66" as Integer

If you need to check whether the String can be converted before performing the conversion, use

String number = "66"

if (number.isInteger()) {
  int value = number as Integer
}

Deprecation Update

In recent versions of Groovy one of the toInteger() methods has been deprecated. The following is taken from org.codehaus.groovy.runtime.StringGroovyMethods in Groovy 2.4.4

/**
 * Parse a CharSequence into an Integer
 *
 * @param self a CharSequence
 * @return an Integer
 * @since 1.8.2
 */
public static Integer toInteger(CharSequence self) {
    return Integer.valueOf(self.toString().trim());
}

/**
 * @deprecated Use the CharSequence version
 * @see #toInteger(CharSequence)
 */
@Deprecated
public static Integer toInteger(String self) {
    return toInteger((CharSequence) self);
}

You can force the non-deprecated version of the method to be called using something awful like:

int num = ((CharSequence) "66").toInteger()

Personally, I much prefer:

int num = 66 as Integer

String fileContents = new File('/path/to/file').text

If you need to specify the character encoding, use the following instead:

String fileContents = new File('/path/to/file').getText('UTF-8')