Re: How to check if a field is a number (integer or float)?

[Ed Morton]

You REALLY should read Effective AWK Programming, 5th Edition, by Arnold 
Robbins to learn the basics of awk and THEN if you have questions about 
how to do certain things post them to appropriate forums established for 
people to ask such questions and get answers from their peers, e.g. 
comp.lang.awk on usenet, or 
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/awk. Directly emailing the 
gawk providers every time you have a question on how to do something in 
awk is outrageously inappropriate and a waste of their time. If you look 
at the mailing list archives at 
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gawk/ you'll see that only you 
are doing that.

    Ed.

On 6/19/2021 8:17 AM, Peng Yu wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am wondering what is the best way to test if a field is a number
> (integer of float). I could use regex. But I am wondering if there is
> a more awk-native way to do the test. Also if regex is used, what is
> the regex that matches integer/float used awk. Thanks.