How to determine if a string is a number with C++?

Question

I\'ve had quite a bit of trouble trying to write a function that checks if a string is a number. For a game I am writing I just need to check if a line from the file I am r

Answer 1

The most efficient way would be just to iterate over the string until you find a non-digit character. If there are any non-digit characters, you can consider the string not a number.

bool is_number(const std::string& s)
{
    std::string::const_iterator it = s.begin();
    while (it != s.end() && std::isdigit(*it)) ++it;
    return !s.empty() && it == s.end();
}

Or if you want to do it the C++11 way:

bool is_number(const std::string& s)
{
    return !s.empty() && std::find_if(s.begin(), 
        s.end(), [](unsigned char c) { return !std::isdigit(c); }) == s.end();
}

As pointed out in the comments below, this only works for positive integers. If you need to detect negative integers or fractions, you should go with a more robust library-based solution. Although, adding support for negative integers is pretty trivial.