Pythonic way to determine if a string is a number

[Philip Semanchuk]

On Feb 15, 2009, at 1:27 PM, Christian Heimes wrote:

> Philip Semanchuk schrieb:
>>
>> On Feb 15, 2009, at 12:46 PM, python at bdurham.com wrote:
>>
>>> What's the Pythonic way to determine if a string is a number? By
>>> number I mean a valid integer or float.
>>
>>
>> try:
>>   int(number)
>>   is_an_int = True
>> except:
>>   is_an_int = False
>
> Please don't teach new Python developers to use bare excepts.

Good point; my example is lazy.

I should know better as I myself got burned on bare excepts a few  
times when I started with Python.