Anonymous Monk,
Ok, for numbers it's simple and doesn't require regular expressions. You could just do:

$number = int $number;
[download]

Now if your question is how do I remove all the periods from a string, I would suggest:

$string =~ tr/.//d;
# or
$string =~ s/\.//g;
[download]

And finally, if you want to remove everything from the first ocurrence of something to the end of the string:

$string = substr( $string, 0, index($string, '.') );
# or
($string) = $string =~ /^([^.]*)/;
[download]

Cheers - L~R