determine if output is string or integer

Question

I am trying to write a script which connects to a database then run a query that returns count of rows in a table. sometimes database or table have problems and instead of an integer they return an error. for example:
A database connection does not exist
i want to determine if output is the integer i want or its an error. i searched through various posts but none of them worked in my script. what should i do?

DB2PATH=/bin/db2
$DB2PATH connect to $1 >> /dev/null
count=$($DB2PATH -x " select count(*) from TEST122 ")


if ! [[ "$count" =~ ^[0-9]+$ ]]
then
    echo "string"
else
    echo $count
fi

i changed the if condition in many different ways. i used -eq and -ne. it keep returning string. and the value of count is 11.

update:
printf '%s' "$count" | hexdump -c output:

0000000                                       1   1
000000b

Answer 1

To ignore and trim leading and trailing whitespace around the number:

if [[ $count =~ ^[[:space:]]*([[:digit:]]+)[[:space:]]*$ ]]; then
  echo number
  count=${BASH_REMATCH[1]}
else
  echo other
fi

Or with standard sh syntax:

trimmed=${count#"${count%%[![:space:]]*}"}
trimmed=${trimmed%"${count##*[![:space:]]}"}
case $trimmed in
  ("" | *[![:digit:]]*) echo other;;
  (*) echo number; count=$trimmed;;
esac

Answer 2

Looks like the variable count has some extra undesirable spaces which is causing your condition to fail it to be an integer type.

You need to strip out the extra spaces in your variable to fix it. Use an external tool like xargs to remove the spaces. The useful thing with xargs is it swallows up both leading and trailing spaces in the variable.

if ! [[ $( xargs <<< "$count" ) =~ ^[0-9]+$ ]]
then
    echo "string"
else
    echo $count
fi

If not for an external tool like xargs use the parameter expansion provided by the shell itself

if ! [[ "${count// /}" =~ ^[0-9]+$ ]]
then
    echo "string"
else
    echo $count
fi

The syntax ${count// /} will replace all the spaces with an empty string and the resultant string is used in the comparison with the regular expression defined.

Answer 3

Putting negation inside expresion gives me correct results:

if [[ ! "$count" =~ ^[0-9]+$ ]]
then
    echo "string"
else
    echo $count
fi