How can I check if a string represents an int, without using try/except?

Question

Is there any way to tell whether a string represents an integer (e.g., \'3\', \'-17\' but not \'3.14\' or \'asf

Answer 1

I really liked Shavais' post, but I added one more test case ( & the built in isdigit() function):

def isInt_loop(v):
    v = str(v).strip()
    # swapping '0123456789' for '9876543210' makes nominal difference (might have because '1' is toward the beginning of the string)
    numbers = '0123456789'
    for i in v:
        if i not in numbers:
            return False
    return True

def isInt_Digit(v):
    v = str(v).strip()
    return v.isdigit()

and it significantly consistently beats the times of the rest:

timings..
isInt_try:   0.4628
isInt_str:   0.3556
isInt_re:    0.4889
isInt_re2:   0.2726
isInt_loop:   0.1842
isInt_Digit:   0.1577

using normal 2.7 python:

$ python --version
Python 2.7.10

Both the two test cases I added (isInt_loop and isInt_digit) pass the exact same test cases (they both only accept unsigned integers), but I thought that people could be more clever with modifying the string implementation (isInt_loop) opposed to the built in isdigit() function, so I included it, even though there's a slight difference in execution time. (and both methods beat everything else by a lot, but don't handle the extra stuff: "./+/-" )

Also, I did find it interesting to note that the regex (isInt_re2 method) beat the string comparison in the same test that was performed by Shavais in 2012 (currently 2018). Maybe the regex libraries have been improved?