This is a cheap and optimistic way of extracting numbers from text. It is quite easy to think of cases where this won't work, but there are tons of real-life cases where it works nicely. I allow for numbers at the end of sentences, like 1.23e3. I certainly don't handle expressions like 1.2+3.4-5.6. This was chosen for simplicity of the regex.

Update: Now also handles cases like "123ears" after reading Identifying and parsing numbers. 

my @numbers= $text =~ /([-+\d.eE]*\d)/g;

[download]

Previous version was: 

my @numbers= grep { s/\.$//; /\d/ } $text =~ /([-+\d.eE]+)/g;

[download]

Update: petral's excellent advice incorporated.

In reply to Extract numbers by tye

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