title: How does one find the currency value in a string?
body: <p>I'm writing a small tool to extract a bunch of values from a string (usually a tweet).</p>
  
  <p>The string could consist of words and numbers along with an amount prefixed by a currency symbol (£,$,€ etc.) and a number of hashtags (#foo #bar). I'm running on appEngine and using tweepy to bring in the tweets.</p>
  
  <p>The current code I have to find the values is below:</p>
  
  <pre><code>tagex = re.compile(r'#.*')
  curex = re.compile(ur'[£].*')
  for x in api.user_timeline(since_id = t.lastimport):
            tags = re.findall(tagex, x.text)
            amount = re.findall(curex, x.text)[0]
            logging.info("Text: " + x.text)
            logging.info("Tags: " + str(tags))
            logging.info("Amount: " + amount)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>where x.text is for example "Taxi London £6.50 #projectfoo #clientmeeting"</p>
  
  <p>The tagex finds the hashtags fine, but I can't get curex to extract the amount currently I get:
  Amount: £6.50 #projectfoo #clientmeeting.</p>
  
  <p>I also need to separate off the currency symbol so as to get the amount as a float, but that should be pretty simple later.</p>