Thanks for the link, adrianh, it's on my notepad now.

Anyway, as I said in the question, I am not looking for a module, nor I am looking for such a grainlevel control over "numeric strings".

Call it a challenge (if you like): are those patterns ok? Would you write them differently for the sake of {efficiency|compactness|speed|readability|anything}? Would you compact all af them in a unique, catchall regex?

That was the question.

Please, don't feel offended about that: pointers to modules that do the job are useful and I don't despise them. But they are not an answer to the question

Ciao!
--bronto

The very nature of Perl to be like natural language--inconsistant and full of dwim and special cases--makes it impossible to know it all without simply memorizing the documentation (which is not complete or totally correct anyway).
--John M. Dlugosz