Problem with large numbers

This problem is related to http://drupal.org/node/108302. By adding the code to strip characters other that numbers and period it causes a problem when editing a node with large numbers of that display in the form 1.234e+06. This is how the number shows in the form but after stripping characters it gets saved as 1.23406. Problem starts with number_widget() simply using items[n]['value'] for the default value. My solution was to call format_number on the value but I am not sure how well that works in general.