apparent concatenation and ... how best to treat a string that is formatted as such.

I don't understand your concern vis-a-vis strings. As noted in other replys, there should be no problem with any such string without resort to sprintf. (But always beware F.P. representation approximation!) Can you cite an example of a string-related problem? 

>perl -wMstrict -le
"for my $s (qw(0000.76 000.76 00.76 0.76 .76)) {
   die qq{oops - '$s' * 4 != 3.04} if $s * 4 != 3.04;
   }
 print 'aok';
"
aok

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In reply to Re^5: Perl with precision by AnomalousMonk
in thread Perl with precision by AlienSpaces

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