Imagine your sales team imports leads from a CSV file every morning. The file comes from different partners, and fields such as Annual Revenue, Discount Percentage, and Probability are stored as text.
You want to run accurate forecasts, build Sales dashboards, and automate follow‑up emails, but you can’t do that if all your numbers live in String fields instead of real numbers.
In Salesforce Apex, a String is just plain text, and a Double is a 64‑bit number that can store decimal values, like 1200000.75 or 0.15. Y
ou use Double when you need to work with numeric data that has decimal points, such as revenue, conversion rates, or product quantities with fractions.
If your CRM stores these values as text, you first need to convert them to Double so Apex can calculate, compare, and report correctly.
In Salesforce Apex, developers often work with different data types such as String, Integer, and Double. Sometimes we receive numeric values as strings and need to convert them to a double to perform calculations.
In our Salesforce org, the development team created a Lightning component that allows sales representatives to enter sales figures for their transactions. The user inputs the sales amount as a string.
I had to convert the string input to a double so that calculations, such as total sales and commissions, and report generation could be performed.
In this article, you will learn how to convert String to Double in Salesforce Apex with simple examples, real-time use cases, common errors, and best practices.
What is String and Double in Apex?
Before conversion, let’s understand both data types.
String in Apex
A String is a sequence of characters enclosed in single quotes.
String Name = 'John';
String email = 'john.doe@example.com';
String message = 'Hello, this is a test message!';
String price = '100.50';Double in Apex
Double is a numeric data type used to store decimal values.
Double price = 100.50;Why Convert a String to a Double in Apex?
We convert a String to a Double when:
- Data comes from UI (Text fields)
- Data comes from the API
- Values are stored as text but used in calculations
For example, you receive a price as “500.75” → need to calculate tax.