MATLAB: What is the fastest way to determine whether a string is a number

Question

Hi, I have a string x and in order to determine wether it is a number one can do the following

try
 flag = isnumeric(eval(x));
catch
  flag=false;
end

Is there a better and faster way to do this?

Thanks

Pat.

Answer 1

Probably:

isnan(str2double(str))

This won't need try/catch either.

Anything with eval in it will definitely not be fast.