Compare string and floats in python

Question

I have a two lists with values that I want to compare. If the value can be converted to a float, I want to compare the floats else I just want to compare the values as strings. How can I make that distinction to check whether a value can be converted to float or not?

Answer 1

The easiest way should be to just try to convert them to floats, and if that fails, fall back to a compare on strings:

def floatstrcmp(left, right):
   try:
      return cmp(float(left), float(right))
   except ValueError:
      return cmp(left, right)