How can you tell if a value is not numeric in Oracle?

Question

I have the following code that returns an error message if my value is invalid. I would like to give the same error message if the value given is not numeric.

Answer 1

The best answer I found on internet:

SELECT case when trim(TRANSLATE(col1, '0123456789-,.', ' ')) is null
            then 'numeric'
            else 'alpha'
       end
FROM tab1;