Does a string represents a floating point number, an integer or a plain string?

I have been programming in Python a long long time, I have not coded as a function one of the most common tests on a string, for the simple reason that it is easy to program directly. Here, we ask: does a string represents a floating point number(reals), an integer or if not these types, a plain string?
Here are simple test cases: -123., -123e0, -123, . will be considered reals or floats. Numbers which do not contain a decimal point or dot or an exponentiation part will be considered integers. Here is our function.

"""
file            dtypeval.py

author      Ernesto P. Adorio, PhD.
                 UPDEPP at Clarkfield, Pampanga

version    0.0.1 september 19, 2011
"""



def dtypeval(s, numericfloat=False):
    """
    Simple function to return the data type and value of a string.
    """
    try:
        if numericfloat or ("." in s) or ("e" in s) or ("E" in s):
           f = float(s)
           return "float", f
        return "int", int(s) 
    except:
        # print "[%s] is not a number!" % s
        return "str", s


if __name__ == "__main__":
   teststring  = ["-123.", "-123", "1e5", "1E5", ".001", "ABC"]

   for s in teststring:
       print s,"==>", dtypeval(s)

Save the above to dtypeval.py and run from the command line python dtype.val. Here is the output:

-123. ==> ('float', -123.0)
-123 ==> ('int', -123)
1e5 ==> ('float', 100000.0)
1E5 ==> ('float', 100000.0)
.001 ==> ('float', 0.001)
ABC ==> [ABC] is not a number!
('str', 'ABC')

Note that numericfloat is set to true if the function is to return float always even if the input sting represents an integer.