How can I tell whether or not an element inside an array is a number or a word (all elements in quotes)

Question

Background information: I have an array

this.someArray = ["Word", "123", "456"]

Where this.someArray is dynamically written (the array elements are not hardcoded)

I need to convert all items that are numbers into numbers (yes I realise that this might not make sense, essentially this is the result I want - where the numbers don't have quotes but leave the words as they are):

["Word", 123, 456]

So the steps I've thought in terms of how to achieve this:

1. Find out whether each element in the array is a word or number

To achieve this I have:

    isNumber(number) { 
      return !isNaN(parseFloat(number)) && !isNaN(number-0) 
    }

2. Use a for each loop to test whether each element is a word or number

   this.someArray.forEach(element => { this.isNumber(element) });

3. Write an if statement (if the element in this.someArray is a number then remove the quotes from that element)

However I'm unsure of whether step 2 is actually the correct thing to do and I'm unsure of how to write step 3

Is there a way to accomplish this?

Further info:

This is what the dynamically generated array looks like:

This is the code:

      this.someArray = this.biggerArray.map((n) => {
        const data = [];
        for (var key of Object.keys(n)) {
          data.push(n[key].data);
        }
        return data;
      });

Answer 1

I think a plain .map would be easier - check if the string is composed of all digits with a regular expression, and if so, call Number on it:

 const arr = ["Word", "123", "456"]; const newArr = arr.map( str => /^\\d+$/.test(str) ? Number(str) : str ); console.log(newArr);

^\\d+$ means:

• ^ - start of string
• \\d+ - one or more digits
• $ - end of string

If the numbers might contain decimals, then add an optional group for the decimal portion:

 const arr = ["Word", "123", "456", '12.45']; const newArr = arr.map( str => /^\\d+(?:\\.\\d+)?$/.test(str) ? Number(str) : str ); console.log(newArr);

For the array of ['Process', '1287'] , it still works as expected:

 const arr = ['Process', '1287']; const newArr = arr.map( str => /^\\d+(?:\\.\\d+)?$/.test(str) ? Number(str) : str ); console.log(newArr);

Answer 2

This approach also works for decimals within quotes.

for (let i in someArray) {
    if (parseFloat(someArray[i])) {
        someArray[i] = parseFloat(someArray[i]);
    }
}

This is a shorter way of doing it.

for (let i in someArray) {
    parseFloat(someArray[i]) && (someArray[i] = parseFloat(someArray[i]));
}