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

Wildcards.

SELECT PATINDEX('%[0-9]%[0-9].[0-9]%[0-9]%','some text 456.09 other text')
SELECT PATINDEX('%[0-9]%[0-9].[0-9]%[0-9]%','even more text 98273.453 la la la')