How to check if string is (int or float) in Python 2.7

Question

I know similar questions have been asked and answered before like here: How do I check if a string is a number (float) in Python?

However, it does not provide the answer I'm looking for. What I'm trying to do is this:

def main():
    print "enter a number"
    choice = raw_input("> ")
    # At this point, I want to evaluate whether choice is a number.
    # I don't care if it's an int or float, I will accept either.

    # If it's a number (int or float), print "You have entered a number."
    # Else, print "That's not a number."
main()

Answers to most of the questions suggest using try..except, but this only allows me to evaluate int or floats exclusively, i.e

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

If I use this code, int values will end up in the exception.

Other methods I've seen include str.isdigit. However, this returns True for int and false for float.

Answer 1

In your case it is enough to simply check whether the input can be converted to a float in a try/except block. The conversion will be successful for any string that could have been converted to an integer as well.

Answer 2

the function you used should be converting int and float values in the form of a string to a float successfully. for some reason you want to specifically want to find weather it is an int or float consider this change.

def is_int_or_float(s):
    ''' return 1 for int, 2 for float, -1 for not a number'''
    try:
        float(s)

        return 1 if s.count('.')==0 else 2
    except ValueError:
        return -1
print is_int_or_float('12')
print is_int_or_float('12.3')
print is_int_or_float('ads')

here is the result

python test.py
1
2
-1