Parsing a String to See if it's Numeric -- Parse vs TryParse vs Char Array Data vs Regular Expressions

Best of JaysonKnight.com -- Happy New Year!

protected virtual void jaysonBlog { — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 09:38:37 GMT

One thing that really bugs me about blogs is that it&rsquo;s still really damn hard to find specific...

New MSDN Magazine Column -- CLR Inside Out

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I just received this month&rsquo;s MSDN magazine&nbsp;in the mail and was thrilled to see a new column...

re: Parsing a String to See if it's Numeric -- Parse vs TryParse vs Char Array Data vs Regular Expressions

David Voss — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 07:55:31 GMT

A related discussion found here: IsNumeric in C#, WHY NOT? http://dotnet.org.za/deonvs/archive/2004/07/06/2579.aspx

re: Parsing a String to See if it's Numeric -- Parse vs TryParse vs Char Array Data vs Regular Expressions

David Voss — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 06:01:22 GMT

That is interesting. Along the same lines, what about checking if a value is a valid date? Currently there isn't a TryParse method for DateTime, only Parse().

re: Parsing a String to See if it's Numeric -- Parse vs TryParse vs Char Array Data vs Regular Expressions

Jayson Knight — Sat, 20 Aug 2005 07:16:10 GMT

@Aaron I agree with you 100% actually, but that wasn't the point of this article. I was trying to do a high level comparison of the different options available along with the pluses/minuses to each. In reality, all data should be validated on the client first (and further scrubbed at the data access layer), thus negating the need for any of the mechanisms I mentioned in this post.

re: Parsing a String to See if it's Numeric -- Parse vs TryParse vs Char Array Data vs Regular Expressions

Jayson Knight — Sat, 20 Aug 2005 07:14:04 GMT

@EvilMe I'll do a post on this shortly as I"m in the same boat as you are.

re: Parsing a String to See if it's Numeric -- Parse vs TryParse vs Char Array Data vs Regular Expressions

Aaron Robinson — Sat, 20 Aug 2005 02:40:58 GMT

Your method of replacing periods and commas stinks for negative numbers and bogus user-entered values like "1.23.4,6.50"...

re: Parsing a String to See if it's Numeric -- Parse vs TryParse vs Char Array Data vs Regular Expressions

evilme — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 03:04:38 GMT

er, what i mean to ask is i can always find long boring technical specs, but i'm looking more for like, someone's delicious tags for the most interesting new features/

re: Parsing a String to See if it's Numeric -- Parse vs TryParse vs Char Array Data vs Regular Expressions

evilmousse — Tue, 16 Aug 2005 03:01:18 GMT

i'm the regex folks eh? ok.. thanks for the scoop, the results sound about right. regex, being a multi-use object, likely couldn't be more efficient than customized char iteration until the task at hand reaches a certain level of complexity. i doubt ssn's would be complex enough, but scraping a webpage for info would be. at that point tho, the issue is developer stress--i wouldn't want to parse a whole variable webpage one char at a time even if it IS more efficient... where can i find more info on tryParse and anything else 'new' in v2 of the cli?

re: Parsing a String to See if it's Numeric -- Parse vs TryParse vs Char Array Data vs Regular Expressions

Jayson Knight — Mon, 15 Aug 2005 19:47:35 GMT

@Jeff For some reason I didn't zip up the source for the application in the link I provided (remedied)...whoops! I modified the source per your recomendations (moved the regex to a member var and initialized it in the RunButton_Click event) and the regex results were still roughly the same.