We have string.isdigit(), why not string.isNumber()?

[Dan Bishop]

On Apr 30, 7:56 pm, MooMaster <ntv1... at gmail.com> wrote:
> N00b question alert! I did a search for isdigit() in the group
> discussion, and it didn't look like the question had been asked in the
> first 2 pages, so sorry if it was...
>
> The manual documentation says:
> "isdigit( )
>
> Return true if all characters in the string are digits and there is at
> least one character, false otherwise.
> For 8-bit strings, this method is locale-dependent. "
>
> So it makes sense that something like 5.6 would return false. But what
> if we want to make sure that our string is a valid number, ie decimals
> included?
>
> I know how to write a regexp or method or whatever to do this, my main
> question is *why* something like an isNumber() method is not baked
> into the class. Does such functionality exist somewhere else in the
> standard library that I'm just missing?

A string s is a valid number if float(s) does not raise a ValueError.