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

I think this question from perlfaq solves your problem.

Generally the problem is defining what exactly you want to read as number.

• is "-1.312" valid number?
• is "inf"?
• 5.34123412E-03 ?