Javascript check if string is all numbers

TL;DR

It depends largely on what you want to parse as a number.

Comparison Between Built-in Functions

As none of the existing sources satisfied my soul, I tried to figure out what actually was happening with these functions.

Three immediate answers to this question felt like:

1. !isNaN(input) (which gives the same output as +input === +input)
2. !isNaN(parseFloat(input))
3. isFinite(input)

But are any of them correct in every scenario?

I tested these functions in several cases, and generated output as markdown. This is what it looks like:

So...which of them is "correct"?

Should be clear by now, it depends largely on what we need. For example, we may want to consider a null input as 0. In that case isFinite() will work fine.

Again, perhaps we will take a little help from isNaN() when 1010000000000 is needed to be considered a valid number (although the question remains—why would it be, and how would we handle that)!

Of course, we can manually exclude any of the scenarios.

Like in my case, I needed exactly the outputs of isFinite(), except for the null case, the empty string case, and the whitespace-only string case. Also I had no headache about really huge numbers. So my code looked like this:

/**
 * My necessity was met by the following code.
 */

if (input === null) {
    // Null input
} else if (input.trim() === '') {
    // Empty or whitespace-only string
} else if (isFinite(input)) {
    // Input is a number
} else {
    // Not a number
}

And also, this was my JavaScript to generate the table:

/**
 * Note: JavaScript does not print numeric separator inside a number.
 * In that single case, the markdown output was manually corrected.
 * Also, the comments were manually added later, of course.
 */

let inputs = [
    123, '123', 12.3, '12.3', '   12.3   ',
    1_000_000, '1_000_000',
    '0b11111111', '0o377', '0xFF',
    '', '    ',
    'abc', '12.34Ab!@#$',
    '10e100', '10e1000',
    null, undefined, Infinity];

let markdownOutput = `| \`input\` | \`!isNaN(input)\` or 
\`+input === +input\` | \`!isNaN(parseFloat(input))\` | \`isFinite(input)\` | Comment |
| :---: | :---: | :---: | :---: | :--- |\n`;

for (let input of inputs) {
    let outputs = [];
    outputs.push(!isNaN(input));
    outputs.push(!isNaN(parseFloat(input)));
    outputs.push(isFinite(input));

    if (typeof input === 'string') {
        // Output with quotations
        console.log(`'${input}'`);
        markdownOutput += `| '${input}'`;
    } else {
        // Output without quotes
        console.log(input);
        markdownOutput += `| ${input}`;
    }

    for (let output of outputs) {
        console.log('\t' + output);
        if (output === true) {
            markdownOutput += ` | 
true
`;
            // markdownOutput += ` | ✔️`; // for stackoverflow
        } else {
            markdownOutput += ` | 
false
`;
            // markdownOutput += ` | ❌`; // for stackoverflow
        }
    }

    markdownOutput += ` ||\n`;
}

// Replace two or more whitespaces with $nbsp;
markdownOutput = markdownOutput.replaceAll(`  `, `  `);

// Print markdown to console
console.log(markdownOutput);

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