Hi. i've noted that the some basic converters: ByteConverter IntConverter LongConverter ShortConverter use the decode method to parse a string into a number. Even if this is the default parsing method supported by java, sometimes it may not be the desired one. for instance, if your working with numbers coming from a db or from Cobol, the sequence "009" means just "9" while the decode method, applying the java convention that parse a sequence starting with a "0" as a octal number, reports an exception because 9 is an illegal character in octal coding. Java classes offer 2 different methods with 2 differents behaviours for parsing sequence number: for instance java.lang.Integer offers decode(String nm) , that doesn't accept a sequence like "009" , java.lang.NumberFormatException valueOf(String s) , that accept the sequence "009" and translate it in the Integer representing the number 9 do you consider to offer the choice for this 2 different behaviours, maybe in a flavour like the class BooleanConverter which offers preconfigurated different instances for the differents desired behaviours? i guess that this change could apply to all integer based converters. thanks paolo