Problem:  You need to determine whether a given input is a number or not.  Unfortunately, Coldfusion's isNumeric() function only checks whether a number can be treated as a number internally.  Therefore, the following strings (without the quotation marks) would cause the function to return a true value:


Although this is fine for many applications, this is often not the desired behaviour such as when you need to validate them before passing it to a MySQL query.

Solution:  A solution I've found so far is to use Regular Expressions.  We use REFind to search for the following regex pattern:


Example:


Please note that this is also applicable to other programming languages that support Regular Expressions (i.e.: either built-in or through a library), although this may no longer be necessary for more elegant languages such as PHP (sorry, I'm biased).