You could return an Integer instead of an int, returning null on parse failure.
It’s a shame Java doesn’t provide a way of doing this without there being an exception thrown internally though – you can hide the exception (by catching it and returning null), but it could still be a performance issue if you’re parsing hundreds of thousands of bits of user-provided data.
EDIT: Code for such a method:
public static Integer tryParse(String text) {
try {
return Integer.parseInt(text);
} catch (NumberFormatException e) {
return null;
}
}
Note that I’m not sure off the top of my head what this will do if text is null. You should consider that – if it represents a bug (i.e. your code may well pass an invalid value, but should never pass null) then throwing an exception is appropriate; if it doesn’t represent a bug then you should probably just return null as you would for any other invalid value.
Originally this answer used the new Integer(String) constructor; it now uses Integer.parseInt and a boxing operation; in this way small values will end up being boxed to cached Integer objects, making it more efficient in those situations.