How do you check that a number is NaN in JavaScript?

Question

I’ve only been trying it in Firefox’s JavaScript console, but neither of the following statements return true:

parseFloat(\'geoff\') == NaN;

parseFloat(\'ge         


        

Answer 1

The rule is:

NaN != NaN

The problem of isNaN() function is that it may return unexpected result in some cases:

isNaN('Hello')      //true
isNaN('2005/12/12') //true
isNaN(undefined)    //true
isNaN('NaN')        //true
isNaN(NaN)          //true
isNaN(0 / 0)        //true

A better way to check if the value is really NaN is:

function is_nan(value) {
    return value != value
}

is_nan(parseFloat("geoff"))