How to check if string input is a number? [duplicate]

Answer 1

the most elegant solutions would be the already proposed,

a=123
bool_a = a.isnumeric()

Unfortunatelly it doesn't work both for negative integers and for general float values of a. If your point is to check if 'a' is a generic number beyond integers i'd suggest the following one, which works for every kind of float and integer :). Here is the test:

def isanumber(a):

    try:
        float(repr(a))
        bool_a = True
    except:
        bool_a = False

    return bool_a


a = 1 # integer
isanumber(a)
>>> True

a = -2.5982347892 # general float
isanumber(a)
>>> True

a = '1' # actually a string
isanumber(a)
>>> False

I hope you find it useful :)