How can I tell if a string in PowerShell contains a number?

I came across a scenario where I wanted to handle data that contained a number in the string one way and everything else a different way.  Using the Get-type() didn’t work for this case because the variable was handles as a string.

PS C:\> $test = "abc123"PS C:\> $test.GetType().fullnameSystem.String

I saw that there were some people on the intertubes that worked through this by splitting the string into an array and getting the ASCII value for each character and checking their value to see if they were in the range.  Something like this;

$Check = "abc123"$Sort = [int[]][char[]]$Check foreach ($Value in $Sort){     if ( (($Value -ge 65) -and  ($Value -le 90)) -or (($Value -ge 97) -and  ($Value -le 122)) )         {                 write-host "Letter"    }}

 

The way I worked out was to check the string against a basic regex pattern to see if any of it matched a number 0-9;

$Check = "abc123"if($Check -match "[0-9]") {    write-host "Number"}

Comments

• Anonymous
  September 12, 2013
  Thanks for your input. I found this to be more reliable: if($_num -match "^[0-9]*$"){ "is int" }

• Anonymous
  December 18, 2013
  @sci It should probably be "^[0-9]+$" to not match the empty string.

• Anonymous
  May 16, 2014
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• Anonymous
  May 16, 2014
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• Anonymous
  May 17, 2014
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  January 03, 2015
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• Anonymous
  January 09, 2015
  You may also want to consider using the following to match negative numbers:
  "^[-0-9]+$"

• Anonymous
  June 09, 2015
  What about:
  ($String_or_Number -eq (($String_or_Number -as [double]) -as [string]))

• Anonymous
  October 02, 2015
  If you evaluate your above examples with $_num = "random string 12" it will fail. If you use -match "[0-9]" it will be correct, while examples in the comments will fail.