newbie question int to string conversion

[Anders olme]

Hello.

I'm tryinig to convert a list of strings to integer. 
The problem is that not all elements are numbers some of them contains letters 
Is there any easy way to determine is a strings contains illegal charaters?
Now I only get exceptions and I think a exceptionshandler is a bit overkill
for my needs.

-- 
//Anders Olme
//
//E-mail: olme at ebox.tninet.se