I'm trying to come up with a peice of regex to classify data types. The way I need to classify these data are numeric and non-numeric. And I need to sub-classify numeric as numeric w/dollar sign/plus signs/neg signs/commas/decimal point. The idea is that I'll be passing fields through this expression and it should return it's classification. To further complicate issues if a field contains something like: "100$00", it would be non-numeric. It would only be numeric if the dollar sign is at the beginning although "+$100" would be numeric as would "-$100". I've been playing with this for a couple of days, so I'm really getting frustated. Here's what I've been trying(unsuccessfully):
/^(\+)?(-)?(\$)?(\d)*(\.)?\d*$/

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I realize that this is flawed and that this may not even be the best way to go about this. Also, this would only account for numeric data not the non-numeric. So I still have to take that into consideration. Whatever method I use it must be efficient as there maybe literally billions of fields being passed through this routine.
I really didn't expect this to be a real stumbling block when I projected my time estimates for this project. It seemed so trivial. I guess after 20+ years of coding (not Perl) I've gotten cocky, I should've realized by now that nothing that gets that many hits is going to be trivial.

In reply to classifying data by sweetblood

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