To follow-on what data_null_ stated ("What you do with that information is up to you.") I think it would be helpful to describe why you want to do this. It would seem that if you need it both numeric and character, then you keep both variables and use the one that's needed at the time. For example if the objective is to line up the decimal places so that you get something like 1 1.000 31.2 0.00012220000 Then you would need to create an additional character string with a fixed length and the decimal would always show in the same position of the character string.
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