How do you check that a number is NaN in JavaScript?

Question

I’ve only been trying it in Firefox’s JavaScript console, but neither of the following statements return true:

parseFloat(\'geoff\') == NaN;

parseFloat(\'ge         


        

Answer 1

Is (NaN >= 0) ?...... "I don't Know".

function IsNotNumber( i ){
    if( i >= 0 ){ return false; }
    if( i <= 0 ){ return false; }
    return true;
}

Conditions only execute if TRUE.

Not on FALSE.

Not on "I Don't Know".

Answer 2

To fix the issue where '1.2geoff' becomes parsed, just use the Number() parser instead.

So rather than this:

parseFloat('1.2geoff'); // => 1.2
isNaN(parseFloat('1.2geoff')); // => false
isNaN(parseFloat('.2geoff')); // => false
isNaN(parseFloat('geoff')); // => true

Do this:

Number('1.2geoff'); // => NaN
isNaN(Number('1.2geoff')); // => true
isNaN(Number('.2geoff')); // => true
isNaN(Number('geoff')); // => true

EDIT: I just noticed another issue from this though... false values (and true as a real boolean) passed into Number() return as 0! In which case... parseFloat works every time instead. So fall back to that:

function definitelyNaN (val) {
    return isNaN(val && val !== true ? Number(val) : parseFloat(val));
}

And that covers seemingly everything. I benchmarked it at 90% slower than lodash's _.isNaN but then that one doesn't cover all the NaN's:

http://jsperf.com/own-isnan-vs-underscore-lodash-isnan

Just to be clear, mine takes care of the human literal interpretation of something that is "Not a Number" and lodash's takes care of the computer literal interpretation of checking if something is "NaN".

Answer 3

So I see several responses to this,

But I just use:

function isNaN(x){
     return x == x && typeof x == 'number';
}

Answer 4

I use underscore's isNaN function because in JavaScript:

isNaN(undefined) 
-> true

At the least, be aware of that gotcha.

Answer 5

alert("1234567890.".indexOf(String.fromCharCode(mycharacter))>-1);

This is not elegant. but after trying isNAN() I arrived at this solution which is another alternative. In this example I also allowed '.' because I am masking for float. You could also reverse this to make sure no numbers are used.

("1234567890".indexOf(String.fromCharCode(mycharacter))==-1)

This is a single character evaluation but you could also loop through a string to check for any numbers.

Answer 6

Use this code:

isNaN('geoff');

See isNaN() docs on MDN.

alert ( isNaN('abcd'));  // alerts true
alert ( isNaN('2.0'));  // alerts false
alert ( isNaN(2.0));  // alerts false