How do I check if a string is a number (float)?

Question

What is the best possible way to check if a string can be represented as a number in Python?

The function I currently have right now is:

def is_number(s):
    try:
        float(s)
        return True
    except ValueError:
        return False

Which, not only is ugly and slow, seems clunky. However I haven't found a better method because calling float in the main function is even worse.

Answer 1

In case you are looking for parsing (positive, unsigned) integers instead of floats, you can use the isdigit() function for string objects.

>>> a = "03523"
>>> a.isdigit()
True
>>> b = "963spam"
>>> b.isdigit()
False

String Methods - isdigit(): Python2, Python3

There's also something on Unicode strings, which I'm not too familiar with Unicode - Is decimal/decimal