Let tryparse accept AbstractChar arguments

[cmcaine]

# Good
parse(Int, "5") == tryparse(Int, "5") == 5
parse(Int, '5') == 5

# Bad!
tryparse(Int, '5') # MethodError, tryparse not defined for Char

This PR lets tryparse parse AbstractChars in the same way that parse does.
This PR also documents that parse accepts characters as well as strings.

[cmcaine]

This is still good to go. CI failure seems unrelated.

[cmcaine]

I've rebased this and updated the first post to better describe the issue. The CI failures still seem like false positives.

Could this be flagged for triage, please?

[adienes]

I'm not sure this needs triage; it needs a reviewer 🙂

making parse and tryparse accept the same argument types certainly seems sensible enough to me.

A character can be used in place of a string for Integer types.

this is a bit clunky. maybe instead make the first line in the docstring Parse a string (or character) as a number.

[cmcaine]

I think I might have copied that line of the docstring from parse.

I'm happy with your suggestion. Are you happy with the code, besides that docstring change?

[adienes]

yes, it looks good to me. to be completely proper, we should add a compat annotation like

!!! compat "Julia 1.13"
    `tryparse(type, AbstractChar)` requires at least Julia 1.13.

[cmcaine]

Cool. I think it should be

tryparse(<:Integer, AbstractChar) requires at least blah

Cos other types in 3rd party code may define parse or tryparse for other types.

I'm happy for you or someone else to male these small changes and merge this PR.

[adienes]

closes #45640

[cmcaine]

this is a bit clunky. maybe instead make the first line in the docstring Parse a string (or character) as a number.

I remember why I wrote it this way now, it's because parse(Float64, "1") works, but parse(Float64, '1') doesn't.

I could fix that by removing the type restriction.

[adienes]

FYI, it's possible #59603 might end up subsuming this PR as it also adds this method (+ some performance improvements). sorry to have your thunder stolen 🙂. if you are interested in helping review that it could be helpful. of course if there ends up being no motion there for a while we could merge this anyway

[cmcaine]

Cool, well I guess we'll see what happens. I'm not precious about someone else fixing this!