#! perl use strict; use warnings; use feature qw( say ); my $decimal = qr{ ( (?: \d+ \.? \d* ) | (?: \d* \.? \d+ ) ) }x; while () { chomp; next unless length; say "$_ => [", (/$decimal/x ? "$1]" : ']'); } __DATA__ 0.12 .12 12. 12 no numbers here abc.def42 .7zx