Text Processing with JavaScript

Recipe 68

Matching Floating-Point Numbers

Task

Suppose you aim to write a regex to match floating-point values because you want to extract stock prices from a string. Or perhaps you want to retrieve other values that have a floating-point representation, such as interest rates, sensor readings, temperatures, or coordinates (latitude and longitude).

You want to be able to specify whether the presence of the sign, integer, and fraction components is mandatory or optional. The regex to use depends on the optional components of the floating-point number. Therefore, this recipe offers different patterns as potential solutions.

Solution

Matching a floating-point value that has a sign, integer, and fraction components:

[+-]\d+\.\d+

Matching a floating-point ...