This is indeed a good catch, the helper function is somewhat helpful but not enough so! I would prefer we catch the types of errors more gracefully. The code should be made more robust so we capture each of these types as they come up instead of just silently ignore.

Could you please amend this to do something like:

In [19]: def _is_float(value):
       :     try:
       :         float(value)
       :     except (TypeError, ValueError):
       :         return False
       :     return True
       :

@aviau UPDATE REQUESTED

@sebito91 I've made the changes you suggested. I'm not quite sure when an exception rather than returning false would be the expected behaviour, but I suppose it's good practice.

Excellent, this looks good! Thanks @BenHewins!

@aviau this is ready to merge!

@BenHewins can you please try to squash into one commit? Thanks!