I believe the pattern given in the question was by way of example only, and the goal was to match any pattern.

If you have a sed with the GNU extension allowing insertion of a newline in the pattern space, one suggestion is:

> set string = "This is a sample 123 text and some 987 numbers"
>
> set pattern = "[0-9][0-9]*"
> echo $string | sed "s/$pattern/\n&\n/g" | sed -n "/$pattern/p"
123
987
> set pattern = "[a-z][a-z]*"
> echo $string | sed "s/$pattern/\n&\n/g" | sed -n "/$pattern/p"
his
is
a
sample
text
and
some
numbers

These examples are with tcsh (yes, I know its the wrong shell) with CYGWIN.

I believe the pattern given in the question was by way of example only, and the goal was to match any pattern.

If you have a sed with the GNU extension allowing insertion of a newline in the pattern space, one suggestion is:

> set string = "This is a sample 123 text and some 987 numbers"
>
> set pattern = "[0-9][0-9]*"
> echo $string | sed "s/$pattern/\n&\n/g" | sed -n "/$pattern/p"
123
987
> set pattern = "[a-z][a-z]*"
> echo $string | sed "s/$pattern/\n&\n/g" | sed -n "/$pattern/p"
his
is
a
sample
text
and
some
numbers

These examples are with tcsh (yes, I know its the wrong shell) with CYGWIN. (Edit: For bash, remove set, and the spaces around =.)