Test whether string is a valid integer - string

Question

I'm trying to do something common enough: Parse user input in a shell script. If the user provided a valid integer, the script does one thing, and if not valid, it does something else. Trouble is, I haven't found an easy (and reasonably elegant) way of doing this - I don't want to have to pick it apart char by char.
I know this must be easy but I don't know how. I could do it in a dozen languages, but not BASH!
In my research I found this:
Regular expression to test whether a string consists of a valid real number in base 10
And there's an answer therein that talks about regex, but so far as I know, that's a function available in C (among others). Still, it had what looked like a great answer so I tried it with grep, but grep didn't know what to do with it. I tried -P which on my box means to treat it as a PERL regexp - nada. Dash E (-E) didn't work either. And neither did -F.
Just to be clear, I'm trying something like this, looking for any output - from there, I'll hack up the script to take advantage of whatever I get. (IOW, I was expecting that a non-conforming input returns nothing while a valid line gets repeated.)
snafu=$(echo "$2" | grep -E "/^[-+]?(?:\.[0-9]+|(?:0|[1-9][0-9]*)(?:\.[0-9]*)?)$/")
if [ -z "$snafu" ] ;
then
echo "Not an integer - nothing back from the grep"
else
echo "Integer."
fi
Would someone please illustrate how this is most easily done?
Frankly, this is a short-coming of TEST, in my opinion. It should have a flag like this
if [ -I "string" ] ;
then
echo "String is a valid integer."
else
echo "String is not a valid integer."
fi

Answer 1

[[ $var =~ ^-?[0-9]+$ ]]
The ^ indicates the beginning of the input pattern
The - is a literal "-"
The ? means "0 or 1 of the preceding (-)"
The + means "1 or more of the preceding ([0-9])"
The $ indicates the end of the input pattern
So the regex matches an optional - (for the case of negative numbers), followed by one or more decimal digits.
References:
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/bashver3.html#REGEXMATCHREF

Answer 2

Wow... there are so many good solutions here!! Of all the solutions above, I agree with #nortally that using the -eq one liner is the coolest.
I am running GNU bash, version 4.1.5 (Debian). I have also checked this on ksh (SunSO 5.10).
Here is my version of checking if $1 is an integer or not:
if [ "$1" -eq "$1" ] 2>/dev/null
then
echo "$1 is an integer !!"
else
echo "ERROR: first parameter must be an integer."
echo $USAGE
exit 1
fi
This approach also accounts for negative numbers, which some of the other solutions will have a faulty negative result, and it will allow a prefix of "+" (e.g. +30) which obviously is an integer.
Results:
$ int_check.sh 123
123 is an integer !!
$ int_check.sh 123+
ERROR: first parameter must be an integer.
$ int_check.sh -123
-123 is an integer !!
$ int_check.sh +30
+30 is an integer !!
$ int_check.sh -123c
ERROR: first parameter must be an integer.
$ int_check.sh 123c
ERROR: first parameter must be an integer.
$ int_check.sh c123
ERROR: first parameter must be an integer.
The solution provided by Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams was also very neat (if you like regex) after it was explained. However, it does not handle positive numbers with the + prefix, but it can easily be fixed as below:
[[ $var =~ ^[-+]?[0-9]+$ ]]

Answer 3

Latecomer to the party here. I'm extremely surprised none of the answers mention the simplest, fastest, most portable solution; the case statement.
case ${variable#[-+]} in
*[!0-9]* | '') echo Not a number ;;
* ) echo Valid number ;;
esac
The trimming of any sign before the comparison feels like a bit of a hack, but that makes the expression for the case statement so much simpler.

Answer 4

I like the solution using the -eq test, because it's basically a one-liner.
My own solution was to use parameter expansion to throw away all the numerals and see if there was anything left. (I'm still using 3.0, haven't used [[ or expr before, but glad to meet them.)
if [ "${INPUT_STRING//[0-9]}" = "" ]; then
# yes, natural number
else
# no, has non-numeral chars
fi

Answer 5

For portability to pre-Bash 3.1 (when the =~ test was introduced), use expr.
if expr "$string" : '-\?[0-9]\+$' >/dev/null
then
echo "String is a valid integer."
else
echo "String is not a valid integer."
fi
expr STRING : REGEX searches for REGEX anchored at the start of STRING, echoing the first group (or length of match, if none) and returning success/failure. This is old regex syntax, hence the excess \. -\? means "maybe -", [0-9]\+ means "one or more digits", and $ means "end of string".
Bash also supports extended globs, though I don't recall from which version onwards.
shopt -s extglob
case "$string" of
#(-|)[0-9]*([0-9]))
echo "String is a valid integer." ;;
*)
echo "String is not a valid integer." ;;
esac
# equivalently, [[ $string = #(-|)[0-9]*([0-9])) ]]
#(-|) means "- or nothing", [0-9] means "digit", and *([0-9]) means "zero or more digits".

Answer 6

Here's yet another take on it (only using the test builtin command and its return code):
function is_int() { test "$#" -eq "$#" 2> /dev/null; }
input="-123"
if is_int "$input"
then
echo "Input: ${input}"
echo "Integer: ${input}"
else
echo "Not an integer: ${input}"
fi

Answer 7

You can strip non-digits and do a comparison. Here's a demo script:
for num in "44" "-44" "44-" "4-4" "a4" "4a" ".4" "4.4" "-4.4" "09"
do
match=${num//[^[:digit:]]} # strip non-digits
match=${match#0*} # strip leading zeros
echo -en "$num\t$match\t"
case $num in
$match|-$match) echo "Integer";;
*) echo "Not integer";;
esac
done
This is what the test output looks like:
44 44 Integer
-44 44 Integer
44- 44 Not integer
4-4 44 Not integer
a4 4 Not integer
4a 4 Not integer
.4 4 Not integer
4.4 44 Not integer
-4.4 44 Not integer
09 9 Not integer

Answer 8

For me, the simplest solution was to use the variable inside a (()) expression, as so:
if ((VAR > 0))
then
echo "$VAR is a positive integer."
fi
Of course, this solution is only valid if a value of zero doesn't make sense for your application. That happened to be true in my case, and this is much simpler than the other solutions.
As pointed out in the comments, this can make you subject to a code execution attack: The (( )) operator evaluates VAR, as stated in the Arithmetic Evaluation section of the bash(1) man page. Therefore, you should not use this technique when the source of the contents of VAR is uncertain (nor should you use ANY other form of variable expansion, of course).

Answer 9

or with sed:
test -z $(echo "2000" | sed s/[0-9]//g) && echo "integer" || echo "no integer"
# integer
test -z $(echo "ab12" | sed s/[0-9]//g) && echo "integer" || echo "no integer"
# no integer

Answer 10

Adding to the answer from Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams. This will allow for the + sign to precede the integer, and it will allow any number of zeros as decimal points. For example, this will allow +45.00000000 to be considered an integer.
However, $1 must be formatted to contain a decimal point. 45 is not considered an integer here, but 45.0 is.
if [[ $1 =~ ^-?[0-9]+.?[0]+$ ]]; then
echo "yes, this is an integer"
elif [[ $1 =~ ^\+?[0-9]+.?[0]+$ ]]; then
echo "yes, this is an integer"
else
echo "no, this is not an integer"
fi

Answer 11

For laughs I roughly just quickly worked out a set of functions to do this (is_string, is_int, is_float, is alpha string, or other) but there are more efficient (less code) ways to do this:
#!/bin/bash
function strindex() {
x="${1%%$2*}"
if [[ "$x" = "$1" ]] ;then
true
else
if [ "${#x}" -gt 0 ] ;then
false
else
true
fi
fi
}
function is_int() {
if is_empty "${1}" ;then
false
return
fi
tmp=$(echo "${1}" | sed 's/[^0-9]*//g')
if [[ $tmp == "${1}" ]] || [[ "-${tmp}" == "${1}" ]] ; then
#echo "INT (${1}) tmp=$tmp"
true
else
#echo "NOT INT (${1}) tmp=$tmp"
false
fi
}
function is_float() {
if is_empty "${1}" ;then
false
return
fi
if ! strindex "${1}" "-" ; then
false
return
fi
tmp=$(echo "${1}" | sed 's/[^a-z. ]*//g')
if [[ $tmp =~ "." ]] ; then
#echo "FLOAT (${1}) tmp=$tmp"
true
else
#echo "NOT FLOAT (${1}) tmp=$tmp"
false
fi
}
function is_strict_string() {
if is_empty "${1}" ;then
false
return
fi
if [[ "${1}" =~ ^[A-Za-z]+$ ]]; then
#echo "STRICT STRING (${1})"
true
else
#echo "NOT STRICT STRING (${1})"
false
fi
}
function is_string() {
if is_empty "${1}" || is_int "${1}" || is_float "${1}" || is_strict_string "${1}" ;then
false
return
fi
if [ ! -z "${1}" ] ;then
true
return
fi
false
}
function is_empty() {
if [ -z "${1// }" ] ;then
true
else
false
fi
}
Run through some tests here, I defined that -44 is an int but 44- isn't etc.. :
for num in "44" "-44" "44-" "4-4" "a4" "4a" ".4" "4.4" "-4.4" "09" "hello" "h3llo!" "!!" " " "" ; do
if is_int "$num" ;then
echo "INT = $num"
elif is_float "$num" ;then
echo "FLOAT = $num"
elif is_string "$num" ; then
echo "STRING = $num"
elif is_strict_string "$num" ; then
echo "STRICT STRING = $num"
else
echo "OTHER = $num"
fi
done
Output:
INT = 44
INT = -44
STRING = 44-
STRING = 4-4
STRING = a4
STRING = 4a
FLOAT = .4
FLOAT = 4.4
FLOAT = -4.4
INT = 09
STRICT STRING = hello
STRING = h3llo!
STRING = !!
OTHER =
OTHER =
NOTE: Leading 0's could infer something else when adding numbers such as octal so it would be better to strip them if you intend on treating '09' as an int (which I'm doing) (eg expr 09 + 0 or strip with sed)