Test whether string is a valid integer

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

Here's yet another take on it (only using the test builtin command and its return code):

function is_int() { return $(test "$@" -eq "$@" > /dev/null 2>&1); } 

input="-123"

if $(is_int "${input}");
then
   echo "Input: ${input}"
   echo "Integer: $[${input}]"
else
   echo "Not an integer: ${input}"
fi

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

[[ $var =~ ^-?[0-9]+$ ]]

• 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 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

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 6

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