I noticed there is not (or I could not find) a function within commons-math to count the number of significant figures in a number string. I wrote a function to do it and want to make sure I'm not missing something within commons-math before submitting a PR.
This feature is necessary when working with scientific/clinical data which was reported with significant figures in mind, and for which calculation results must respect the sigfig count. As far as I could tell there is no Number implementation which correctly respects this. e.g. "11000" has 2 significant figures, "11000." has 5 ".11000" has 5 "11000.0" has 6 Other points: * BigDecimal.precision is not a substitute because it trailing whole zeros are significant * Floats, which can report scientific notation, are not a substitute when calculations must be exact * Ive also considered extending BigDecimal to support tracking and enforcing sigfigs. This would still require the function to initially count them. Is this appropriate for a PR? Or have I missed an existing feature? Dan
