In Perl, how can I tell if a string is a number?

Question

I am using Perl to convert some XML to JSON. If the XML attribute is a number, I don\'t want to put quotes around it so that JSON will treat it as a number and not a string. How

Answer 1

Try Scalar::Util::looks_like_number:

E.g.:

use Scalar::Util qw(looks_like_number);

if (looks_like_number($thingy)) {
    print "looks like $thingy is a number...\n"
}