Using PATINDEX to find varying length patterns in T-SQL

Question

I\'m looking to pull floats out of some varchars, using PATINDEX() to spot them. I know in each varchar string, I\'m only interested in the first float that exists, but they

Answer 1

I blogged about this a while ago. Extracting numbers with SQL server

Declare @Temp Table(Data VarChar(100))

Insert Into @Temp Values('some text 456.09 other text')
Insert Into @Temp Values('even more text 98273.453 la la la')
Insert Into @Temp Values('There are no numbers in this one')

Select Left(
             SubString(Data, PatIndex('%[0-9.-]%', Data), 8000),
             PatIndex('%[^0-9.-]%', SubString(Data, PatIndex('%[0-9.-]%', Data), 8000) + 'X')-1)
From   @Temp