How to check if String value is Boolean type in Java?

I did a little search on this but couldn't find anything useful.

The point being that if String value is either "true" or "false" the return value should be true. In every other value it should be false.

I tried these:

String value = "false";
System.out.println("test1: " + Boolean.parseBoolean(value));
System.out.println("test2: " + Boolean.valueOf(value));
System.out.println("test3: " + Boolean.getBoolean(value));

All functions returned false :(


  • parseBoolean(String) returns true if the String is (case-insensitive) "true", otherwise false
  • valueOf(String) ditto, returns the canonical Boolean Objects
  • getBoolean(String) is a red herring; it fetches the System property of the given name and compares that to "true"

There exists no method to test whether a String encodes a Boolean; for all practical effects, any non-"true"-String is "false".


return "true".equals(value) || "false".equals(value);

Apache commons-lang3 has BooleanUtils with a method toBooleanObject:

BooleanUtils.toBooleanObject(String str)

// where: 

BooleanUtils.toBooleanObject(null)    = null
BooleanUtils.toBooleanObject("true")  = Boolean.TRUE
BooleanUtils.toBooleanObject("false") = Boolean.FALSE
BooleanUtils.toBooleanObject("on")    = Boolean.TRUE
BooleanUtils.toBooleanObject("ON")    = Boolean.TRUE
BooleanUtils.toBooleanObject("off")   = Boolean.FALSE
BooleanUtils.toBooleanObject("oFf")   = Boolean.FALSE
BooleanUtils.toBooleanObject("blue")  = null