Thanks lehmannds for the solution, and Mike for the robust refinement. It works great, replaces my cursor 37x faster for the piece I was working on.

Great article and it surely points the way for more efficient statements.

I'm eagerly anticipating the next series of this article for more complicated scenarios where cursors can be replaced.

I'm...

Thanks a lot for the lead.

I suppose this can take care of the trailing decimal point for integers:

SELECT REPLACE(REPLACE(RTRIM(REPLACE(@a, '0' ,' ')), ' ','0') + ' ', '....