Given a string like "v 1.2 4.2342 8.2 -1.0e14" (e.g., from a .obj file), you could use the following ruby line to extract an ordered list of the contained floating point numbers:
line.scan(/[+-]?[0-9]*\.?[0-9]+(?:[eE][-+]?[0-9]+)?/).collect{|s| s.to_f}
which would produce
=> [1.2, 4.2342, 8.2, 100000000000000.0]