How do I check if a string is a number (float)?

Question

What is the best possible way to check if a string can be represented as a number in Python? The function I currently have right now is: def is_number(s): try: float(s) return True except ValueError: return FalseWhich, not only is ugly and slow, seems clunky. However I haven't found a better method because calling `float` in the main function is even worse.

Answer 1

Honestly this is one of the ways I'd do it. You can also try with regex. Make sure to import re for regex and try re.match("^\d+?\.\d+?", stringName). I can't promise it will work for you but a quick test worked for me.