How to check if String is Number in Swift

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Table of Contents

There are many ways to check whether a string is a number in Swift.

Since people refer to a number differently, to get the right solution, we need to know what kind of number we are going to check.

I will classify a number into four categories.

1. String with only digits, e.g., 0 to 9
2. String with decimal numbers, e.g., ๙
3. String represents a number, e.g., ⅚, 7, 𝟠
4. String represents a whole number, e.g., 1, 万

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String with only digits

If you want to check whether a string contains only 0 to 9, the easiest method is explicitly check for those ten characters (0 to 9).

There might be many ways to do this, but I will show you two ways to do it.

CharacterSet

We declare a character set with all characters that we want to check. Then we check our string against that set.

extension String {
    var isNumber: Bool {
        let digitsCharacters = CharacterSet(charactersIn: "0123456789")        
        return CharacterSet(charactersIn: self).isSubset(of: digitsCharacters)
    }
}

Regular Expression

You can also use regular expression for this.

We use range(of:options:) method. This method finds and returns the range of the first occurrence of a given string within the string.

We provide a regular expression pattern as a search string and specify comparing options as .regularExpression to make the method do a regular expression search.

extension String {
    var isNumber: Bool {
        return self.range(
            of: "^[0-9]*$", // 1
            options: .regularExpression) != nil
    }
}

1^[0-9]*$ is a pattern that matches a string that starts and ends with the numbers 0 to 9.

Both methods yield the same result.

"0123456789".isNumber = true
"๑๒๓๔๕๖๗๘๙".isNumber = false
"⅚".isNumber = false
"㊈".isNumber = false
"𝟠".isNumber = false
"万".isNumber = false
"1️⃣".isNumber = false
"123456.789".isNumber = false
"123,456,789".isNumber = false
"123,456.789".isNumber = false
"SwiftUI 2.0".isNumber = false

String with Decimal numbers

If you want to check for string contains any characters classified as Decimal Numbers, you can use the built-in character set, CharacterSet.decimalDigits

CharacterSet.decimalDigits is the set of all characters used to represent the decimal values 0 through 9.

These character sets include a wider range of decimal digits.

For example:

• Decimal digits in other languages, e.g, ๑๒๓ (123 in Thai).
• Decimal digits used in mathematics, i.e., Doublestruck[1] style digits, e.g., 𝟠

I use the same technique in the previous section but with a different character set.

extension String {
    var isNumber: Bool {
        let characters = CharacterSet.decimalDigits
        return CharacterSet(charactersIn: self).isSubset(of: characters)
    }
}

Here is the result.

"0123456789".isNumber = true
"๑๒๓๔๕๖๗๘๙".isNumber = true
"⅚".isNumber = false
"㊈".isNumber = false
"𝟠".isNumber = true
"万".isNumber = false
"1️⃣".isNumber = false
"123456.789".isNumber = false
"123,456,789".isNumber = false
"123,456.789".isNumber = false
"SwiftUI 2.0".isNumber = false

String represents a number

There are many strings that can represent a number, for example, "⅚" (Fraction) and "㊈" (Circled Chinese nine).

Swift Character has a built-in property, isNumber, that can indicate whether the character represents a number or not.

We use this property along with allSatisfy to check whether all the characters in a string are a number.

allSatisfy returns a Boolean value indicating whether every element of a sequence satisfies a given predicate.

extension String {
    var isNumber: Bool {
        return self.allSatisfy { character in
            character.isNumber
        }
    }
}

As you can see isNumber property can detect many Unicode characters representing a number.

"0123456789".isNumber = true
"๑๒๓๔๕๖๗๘๙".isNumber = true
"⅚".isNumber = true
"㊈".isNumber = true
"𝟠".isNumber = true
"万".isNumber = true
"1️⃣".isNumber = true
"123456.789".isNumber = false
"123,456,789".isNumber = false
"123,456.789".isNumber = false
"SwiftUI 2.0".isNumber = false

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String represents a whole number

Character also has another property, isWholeNumber, to test for a character that can represent a whole number.

This is similar to String represents a number but will contain fewer characters, e.g., "⅚" (fraction isn't a whole number).

extension String {
    var isNumber: Bool {
        return self.allSatisfy { character in
            character.isWholeNumber
        }
    }
}

Here is the result.

"0123456789".isNumber = true
"๑๒๓๔๕๖๗๘๙".isNumber = true
"⅚".isNumber = false
"㊈".isNumber = true
"𝟠".isNumber = true
"万".isNumber = true
"1️⃣".isNumber = false
"123456.789".isNumber = false
"123,456,789".isNumber = false
"123,456.789".isNumber = false
"SwiftUI 2.0".isNumber = false

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1. A letter of the alphabet drawn with doubled vertical strokes is called doublestruck, or sometimes blackboard bold (because doublestruck characters provide a means of indicating bold font weight when writing on a blackboard). For example, 𝟘𝟙𝟚𝟛𝟜𝟝𝟞𝟟𝟠𝟡. https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Doublestruck.html ↩︎