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= $text =~ /([-+\d.eE]*\d)/g;
Previous version was:
my @numbers= grep { s/\.$//; /\d/ } $text =~ /([-+\d.eE]+)/g;
Update: petral's excellent advice incorporated.