the OP didn't specify if e.g. 05.0 is identical to 5 or not - probably yes
Well, OP specified "!=" operator in original post.
However, as shown below, sanitizing input
In general case, programmer cannot control if his data is numified or no. So I don't think it's really about "sanitizing".
floats might need normalisation using sprintf...
In general case, normalization for floats won't work well, example: 
perl -e 'my ($a, $b) = (0.45000001, 0.4499999); print sprintf ("%0.1f 
+%0.1f %f", $a, $b, $a-$b )'

[download]
prints 0.5, 0.4 and 0.000000

My example Re: Multiple Conditional Statements can be fixed to work with floats (but I admit it's slow).
UPD: fixed float example

In reply to Re^2: Multiple Conditional Statements by vsespb
in thread Multiple Conditional Statements by jdlev

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