[plug] check value type

Bernd Felsche bernie at innovative.iinet.net.au
Wed Aug 27 13:08:52 WST 2003


On Wed, Aug 27, 2003 at 12:10:12PM +0800, Jon  Miller wrote:
> Is there a way to check the "type" of a value.  By this I would
> like to check if the value of a variable is either a string or
> number.

For _simple_ numbers, you can use 'expr'. Simply add zero and
check the return status.

More rigourously, you could use tr, sed, awk, etc to strip out
numeric patterns from a string and see if there's anything left;
which would indicate non-numeric.

The again, isn't "pi" numeric? :-)

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