Number means a lot of things to a lot of people. One generally tricky bit to consider is scientific notation, i.e. "1.0e1". Fortunately, Perl is smarter than your average third-grader. If the unnecessary bit is only at the end of your string, you can simply use 0+ (the venus operator I think) to numify the result, and let Perl do the heavy lifting: 

my @array = ("  321abc  ", "100%", "20 lbs.");
no warnings "numeric";
print(0+$_,"\n") for @array;

[download]

If you have leading chaff, you can run it through a substitution to strip that first: 

my @array = ("  321abc  ", "100%", "20 lbs.", "words20", "**39.99.99**
+");
no warnings "numeric";
for (@array) {
    s/^[^0-9.-]+//;
    print(0+$_,"\n");    
}

[download]

In reply to Re: How to strip non-numeric values from string? by kennethk
in thread How to strip non-numeric values from string? by jdlev

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