When is something a number and not a number

[Claus Mygind]

Using the following coding

 
<input type text id="myField" value ="" />
 
var cThisVal = parseFloat( document.getElementById("myField").value)
 
 

When I check the value of "cThisVal" and see the response is NaN not a number.

I then test to see if it a number like this.

typeof cThisVal == "number"  evaluates to false
typeof document.getElementById("myField").value == "number"  evaluates to true

So am I to assume that "parsefloat" makes cThisValue a number even though it is not. Also if it evaluated as a number, what is the value?

[Claus Mygind]

Ok I think I got that one figured out. just use the "isNaN(cThisVal)" function instead to get the right result.

[gits]

yep ... in such cases the isNaN() method could/should be used. for parseFloat() it is correct that this method will cast the string that is given to it to a js-floating number ... and when it cannot be parsed correctly then the method returns NaN (not a number) ... but we cannot really rely on that ... have a look at the following examples:

var s = '1.foo';
alert(parseFloat(s)); // alerts 1
 
var s1 = '.1s';
alert(parseFloat(s1)); // alerts 0.1

so even when the value is not a number parseFloat() does the 'best' to parse it and returns the number that could be parsed by just leaving out the characters that invalidate the number ... so we would have (at least we could have) a logical error when we would rely on parseFloat()'s return to decide the value was a number or not :) because both of them in the example where not ... but in both of the cases we don't get a NaN ...

kind regards