in reply to Re^2: substitution "0" in decimals
in thread substitution "0" in decimals

I was certainly aware of the dissonance between the goal of simply stripping zeros and the replacement scheme I used. I was, however, hung up on "Variable length lookbehind not implemented in regex" (i.e. s/0+$(?<=\.\d+)//; or some such other non-functional code).