how to check if a value is a floating point or not

[Nicholas Cannon]

On Thursday, June 19, 2014 1:53:31 PM UTC+8, Nicholas Cannon wrote:
> I am making a calculator and i need it to support floating point values but i am using the function isnumeric to check if the user has entered an int value. I need the same for floating point types so i could implement an or in the if statement that checks the values the user has entered and allow it to check and use floating points. If you need the source code i am happy to give it to you. Thank you for your help

I am using python 2.7.7 and i have come up with away but there is still possible errors for this. What i did was i this

#checks if the user input is an integer value
def checkint(a):
	if a.isnumeric():
		return True
	else:
		if a.isalpha():
			return False
		else:
			return True

The parameter a is the users input by the raw_input function. I first test if it is normal int with the isnumeric function. Unfortunately this function picks up the decimal as false. This means if the user inputs a float it has to be false. I then test if this input has any alphabetical characters if it does not the user could have only entered  something like 12.5 oppose to abc.d. This method works fine and it i have  tested it and it works fine. if incase this input did have a letter it would be picked up by the isalpha function. There is one annoying error doing it this way and that is if you enter 12.ab or ab.12 it will say that it is okay. Still working on this so this should get sorted out soon.