You could use x ** (1. / 3)
to compute the (floating-point) cube root of x
.
The slight subtlety here is that this works differently for negative numbers in Python 2 and 3. The following code, however, handles that:
def is_perfect_cube(x):
x = abs(x)
return int(round(x ** (1. / 3))) ** 3 == x
print(is_perfect_cube(63))
print(is_perfect_cube(64))
print(is_perfect_cube(65))
print(is_perfect_cube(-63))
print(is_perfect_cube(-64))
print(is_perfect_cube(-65))
print(is_perfect_cube(2146689000)) # no other currently posted solution
# handles this correctly
This takes the cube root of x
, rounds it to the nearest integer, raises to the third power, and finally checks whether the result equals x
.
The reason to take the absolute value is to make the code work correctly for negative numbers across Python versions (Python 2 and 3 treat raising negative numbers to fractional powers differently).