pattern matching problem

[Geoff Smith <spammealot1@...>]

Hi
 
I always seem to have difficulty with pattern matching in Lua, here is another example that has stumped me so far
 
I am trying to trim a number string to remove non significant trailing zeros. So for example
 
"123.450000000" = "123.45"
"1234500" = "1234500"
"12345.00" = "12345.0"
 
I could of course write a function that iterates through the string from the back dropping zeros, but I thought there is probably a more elegant solution using Lua pattern matching functions.
 
Can this be done neatly with pattern matching ? Thanks for any suggested code snippets
 
Regards Geoff