sub valid_number
{
#  See if a string is a valid number.	WJS  Apr 99
#  Idea is to turn warnings on, force a numeric calculation, trap
#    any resulting warning message, and see if it's appropriate.
#    Because it's only a warning, eval does not set $@ as it does for
#    worse errors.  Therefore, the fooling with signals...
#  Of course this breaks if the message changes.  Much better would
#    be to have a perl-callable strtod function...
#  The perl manual says that numbers match /[+-]\d*\.?\d*E[+-]\d+/
#    (when it was talking about library module BigFloat).  However, that
#    description clearly doesn't reflect the optional portions of numbers...

  local ($numeric_flag) = 1;

  my ($old_val_warn) = $^W;
  $^W = 1;			# Turn on warnings

#   Used to have sub test $_[0] (the warning message) to see if it was
#   an "Argument .* not numeric" message.  Now think that if the eval gets
#   any kind of warning, there must be a problem with the putative number,
#   so just decide it's not a number.  Presumably if there were
#   a numeric warning (overflow? is this a fatal?), the this technique
#   would be incorrect.  If we know that numeric warnings have their
#   own signal, presumably we could trap that, too (and we'd get it before
#   __WARN__ or __DIE__?)
  local $SIG{__WARN__} = sub { $numeric_flag = 0; };

  eval '$_[0] + 1';		# Anything that does arithmetic

  $old_val_warn || ($^W = 0);	# Reset warnings if appropriate
  $SIG{__WARN__} = 'DEFAULT';	# Return signal to normal behavior

  return $numeric_flag;
}
1;