shortyfw06 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am trying to modify the following regular expression, which is for integers either negative or positive. 

$_[0] =~ /^(?:|-|\d+|-\d+)$/

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I'd like the regular expression to also capture floating point values either negative or positive. I thought this would work but it is not. 

$_[0] =~ /^(?:|-|\d+|-\d+|\d+\.\d+|-\d+\.\d+)$/

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Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Floating Point/Integer Regular Expression
by tobyink (Canon) on Jul 25, 2012 at 15:29 UTC

    Scalar::Util provides an excellent looks_like_number function.

    use Scalar::Util qw< looks_like_number >;
use Test::More tests => 6;

ok looks_like_number '1';
ok looks_like_number '123';
ok looks_like_number '-123';
ok looks_like_number '1.0';
ok looks_like_number '123.0';
ok looks_like_number '-123.0';

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    View the source for Scalar::Util::PP - it's got a few regular expressions you could probably borrow.

    perl -E'sub Monkey::do{say$_,for@_,do{($monkey=[caller(0)]->[3])=~s{::}{ }and$monkey}}"Monkey say"->Monkey::do'
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      Thank you. That is a useful function! I ended up answering my own question for a regex that includes negative/positive integers and negative/positive floating points.

      /^(?:|-|\d+|-\d+|\d+.|-\d+\.|\d+\.\d+|-\d+\.\d+)$/

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      And just for clarification, this is used as a -validatecommand.

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        Did you know that regexp matches:

        • -
        • 1.

        But fails to match:

        • .1
        • -.1

        You might want to try this. It's somewhat simpler than yours, and it disallows the single hyphen, but allows decimals which start with the decimal point and no preceding 0.

        /^[-]?(?:[.]\d+|\d+(?:[.]\d*)?)$/

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        Or if you consider a leading/trailing decimal point to be an error, it can be made simpler:

        /^[-]?\d+(?:[.]\d+)?$/

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        perl -E'sub Monkey::do{say$_,for@_,do{($monkey=[caller(0)]->[3])=~s{::}{ }and$monkey}}"Monkey say"->Monkey::do'
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Re: Floating Point/Integer Regular Expression
by moritz (Cardinal) on Jul 25, 2012 at 16:49 UTC
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