Re: Regular expression: How to determine wether entry is a number?

On 29 Jul., 17:40, mri...@xxxxxxxxx (Paul Lalli) wrote:
On Jul 29, 8:46 am, janhorstm...@xxxxxx (Jan-Henrik) wrote:

I'm new to Perl and I have a simple question:

Yes, but unfortunately it doesn't have a simple answer.... :-/

I ask for the entry of a number vie <STDIN>:

----------------------------------------
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $foo;
print "Enter number: ";
$foo = <STDIN>;
comp($foo);

I think you meant "chomp", not "comp".

----------------------------------------

Now I would like to check wether the user really entered a number and
not letters. What would a check like that look like? A regular
expression like this:
----------------------------------------
unless ($foo =~ /[a-zA-Z\D+][^.][\D*]/ {...};
----------------------------------------

Is there an easier or more beautiful way?

Well the problem is that you need to define what you mean by "a
number".   Depending on what kinds of numbers are valid, your regexp
might be simple or very complex:

A single digit:   /^\d$/
A whole number:  /^\d+$/
An integer, possibly negative:   /^-?\d+$/
A floating point number, possibly negative:  /^-?\d+\.\d+$/
An integer *or* floating point number, possibly negative:  /^-?\d+(?:\.
\d+)?$/
A number in scientific notation:  /^-?\d+(?:\.\d+)?(?:[eE]-?\d+(?:\.\d
+)?)?$/

There are more complications that could be thrown in too.  Like, is a
+ sign allowed for positive numbers?  Do floating points that are less
than 0 have to start with 0, or can just ".9" be a valid number?  Can
they use the comma to separate thousands?

Depending on what you're looking for, you might be better off using
the Regexp::Common::number module, found on the CPAN athttp://search.cpan..org/~abigail/Regexp-Common-2.122/lib/Regexp/Common...

I don't know why my first answers weren't published, but I will try
again. First of all thank you for your detailed answer. In my case I
only need to reed a number like 1.2345, so simply excluding [a-zA-Z]
is fine for me...

Also, how would I substract just a number from a string? Searched the
net for an example but didn't succeed, so sorry for asking a question
like that...

I don't know what you're trying to ask here.  Please give us an
example of what you want to do - what the string will contain before
you do something to it, and what the string will look like afterwards.

Good luck,
Paul Lalli

Let's say I have a string like this:
-----------------
Butter (kg) 2.00052 Peanuts
(kg) 5.35
-----------------

Ho do I extract just the number(s) from that string and put them in a
variable? Is there a beautiful way to do it?

Once again, thank you very much for your help!

Jan-Henrik

.

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