Since the files that you will handle may assume various formats (for instance a file may be tab-delimited, or use white spaces as fillers) you may have to perform some text processing before you extract numerical data with Smile's extractcolumn command.

You can use AppleScript's built-in text commands, and you can use Smile's text commands.
Use AppleScript's built-in commands to concatenate strings (using &), to split strings (using text items), to find a substring in a string (using offset), or to extract a substring (using text i thru j). See AppleScript's reference documentation for more info.

Use Smile's commands to find a pattern in a string, and to perform changes in a string. Smile's commands feature the Regular expressions. For more info, please consult the Smile documentation about Text commands.