Removing zeros from a numeric string in Python

Suppose i have numeric string. I would like to remove all the trailing zeros and also the decimal point if necessary. For example -

'0.5' -> '.5'
'0005.00' -> '5'

I used this method :

s.strip("0") # where 's' contains the numeric string.

But for the 0005.00, it returns 5., so how would i remove the decimal point if necessary.

Solution

To achieve this you could write a little function

def dostuff(s):
    s = s.strip('0')
    if len(s) > 0 and s[-1] == '.':
        s = s[:-1]
    return s

This strips all the 0s and if a . was found and it was at the end of the string (meaning its the decimal point and nothing follows it) it will strip that too using [s:-1] (this strips the last character).

s[-1] gets the last character of the string. With this we can check if . is the last character.

This may be achieved with less code using a regex, but I think this is easier to follow

Demo

>>> print dostuff('5.0')
5
>>> print dostuff('005.00')
5
>>> print dostuff('.500')
.5
>>> print dostuff('.580')
.58
>>> print dostuff('5.80')
5.8