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 guess the question is related with speed since the try/except has a time penalty:

 test data

First, I created a list of 200 strings, 100 failing strings and 100 numeric strings.

from random import shuffle
numbers = [u'+1'] * 100
nonumbers = [u'1abc'] * 100
testlist = numbers + nonumbers
shuffle(testlist)
testlist = np.array(testlist)

 numpy solution (only works with arrays and unicode)

np.core.defchararray.isnumeric can also work with unicode strings np.core.defchararray.isnumeric(u'+12') but it returns and array. So, it's a good solution if you have to do thousands of conversions and have missing data or non numeric data.

import numpy as np
%timeit np.core.defchararray.isnumeric(testlist)
10000 loops, best of 3: 27.9 µs per loop # 200 numbers per loop

try/except

def check_num(s):
  try:
    int(s)
    return True
  except:
    return False

def check_list(l):
  return [check_num(e) for e in l]

%timeit check_list(testlist)
1000 loops, best of 3: 217 µs per loop # 200 numbers per loop

Seems that numpy solution is much faster.

Answer 2

Greg Hewgill's approach was missing a few components: the leading "^" to only match the start of the string, and compiling the re beforehand. But this approach will allow you to avoid a try: exept:

import re
INT_RE = re.compile(r"^[-]?\d+$")
def RepresentsInt(s):
    return INT_RE.match(str(s)) is not None

I would be interested why you are trying to avoid try: except?

Answer 3

I think

s.startswith('-') and s[1:].isdigit()

would be better to rewrite to:

s.replace('-', '').isdigit()

because s[1:] also creates a new string

But much better solution is

s.lstrip('+-').isdigit()

Answer 4

I have one possibility that doesn't use int at all, and should not raise an exception unless the string does not represent a number

float(number)==float(number)//1

It should work for any kind of string that float accepts, positive, negative, engineering notation...

Answer 5

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?

Answer 6

This is probably the most straightforward and pythonic way to approach it in my opinion. I didn't see this solution and it's basically the same as the regex one, but without the regex.

def is_int(test):
    import string
    return not (set(test) - set(string.digits))