How to know if a value is a string without numerical elements?

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1

Obviously, I know that I can do string:find(), but why repeat that 10 times? Is there an actual way numerical elements can be detected?

2

I’m not too sure what you specifically mean, but, my guess is that you’re asking to determine if a string has numbers in it.

You can totally take advantage of pattern matching in that case, particularly the character classes section.

string.find will do a pattern search by default, so you can just use the character class for numerical digits (%d):

local hasNumber = string.find(targetString, "%d") -- search for numerical digits (0123456789)
-- hasNumber will be nil if there are no digits (numbers) but will be the position of the first number if there is one
if not hasNumber then
	-- doesn't have a number in it
	print("There are no numerical digits in the string '" .. targetString .. "'")
else
	-- has a number in it at the index in hasNumber
	local digit = string.sub(hasNumber, hasNumber + 1)
	print("The first numerical digit in the string '" .. targetString .. "' is", digit)
end

Note
Passing a fourth argument of true to string.find disables pattern matching (this is a somewhat newer feature, there used to be no such thing as a plain find built in):

-- search for the text "%d" with pattern matching disabled
print(string.find("123 %d abc", "%d", nil, true)) -- 5 6
-- Note: nil is (sort of) the default for arguments you don't specify, it works on almost any Roblox function to just put "nil" wherever you don't want to pass an argument
-- this won't search for numbers, instead it just uses the plain text of the search argument, so it won't do any pattern matching, and just works like a plain find
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3

Yeah, this is exactly what I was looking for! Sorry if I wasn’t specific.

Thanks a lot! I appreciate it.

1 Like