Extracting data from structured strings

In a lot of automated tasks, we'll need to treat input text that's in a particular format and extract the relevant information. For example, a spreadsheet may define a percentage in text (such as 37.4%) that we want to retrieve in numerical format to apply it later (0.374, as a float).

In this recipe, we'll see how to process sale logs that contain inline information about a product, such as sold, price, profit, and some other information.