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

You can use the following regular expression which will match integers (e.g., 123), floating-point numbers (12.3), and numbers with exponents (1.2e3):

^-?\d*\.?\d+([eE]-?\d+)?$

If you want to accept + signs as well as - signs (as Oracle does with TO_NUMBER()), you can change each occurrence of - above to [+-]. So you might rewrite your block of code above as follows:

IF (option_id = 0021) THEN 
    IF NOT REGEXP_LIKE(value, '^[+-]?\d*\.?\d+([eE][+-]?\d+)?$') OR TO_NUMBER(value) < 10000 OR TO_NUMBER(value) > 7200000 THEN
        ip_msg(6214,option_name);
        RETURN;
    END IF;
END IF;

I am not altogether certain that would handle all values so you may want to add an EXCEPTION block or write a custom to_number() function as @JustinCave suggests.