in reply to Not a Number
You use regexes to check whether something is a valid number. The advantage of this is that you can easily adapt the regexes to whatever your interpretation of a number is. Here's an example out of the Cookbook:
Chapter 2 of the Perl Cookbook provides numerous recipes for dealing with numbers in Perl. It comes highly recommended.use strict; my $number="3.141529"; print "$number is a C float!\n" if $number=~/^([+-]?)(?=\d|\.\d)\d*(\. +\d*)?([Ee]([+-]?\d+))?$/;
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Robartes-
In Section
Seekers of Perl Wisdom