Regular Expression for any number

Hi,

I am trying to use a regular expression to validate numbers.
For e.g.:

-1
+1
1.23456n
123456n.123456n
1,234,567n
1,234,567n.123456n
-1,234,567n.123456n
+1,234,567n.123456n

So its basically any kind of a valid number. [Any number of digits before or after decimal place. The decimal point (may or may not occur) only once throughout and the commas(may or may not occur) any number of times.]

The regular expression that I used is this: ^[-+]?[\\,\\d]*\\.?\\d*$
But it fails

for as simple a number as -1 and works for +1
Please help. Any suggestions for new regular expression satisfying the above conditions is also welcome

-Ninad

For starters this website is handy - I will also have a look whats up with your regex

http://www.regexplanet.com/simple/index.html

I think that in the expression [-+], the - is being interpreted as a special character - as in [a-z] or [0-9]. Try escaping it as [\\-+] instead.

Also, here are some sample inputs that I think are likely to be considered numbers, according to your current regex:

12,34,56
,123
123,,456
,,,,,,
,
.
(and last, a blank line, which I can't really show clearly)

It's up to you whether these special cases are important enough to justify further modifying the regex to disallow them.

^[+-]{0,1}[\d\,]*n?\.{0,1}\d+n?

This seems to work

Hi,
Thanks to you Mike & Stephan.

Like Mike suggested, I tried escaping the hyphen '-' and it worked perfectly.

I will still like to try with Stephans suggestion...
Thanks anyways you guys!

-Ninad

Hm, that reminds me of something I forgot to ask earlier. Ninad, why do you have the letter 'n' in so many of your numbers? Since your regex didn't mention them I assumed they were some sort of mistake, but I can't imagine how they came to be. Do users really type "123456n.123456n" instead of "123456.123456"?

I am so sorry, I should have been clearer.
'n' only means that there could be 'n' number of digits in the number.
It seems, I carried my algebra notations too far.

Thanks again for the help!