Convert a string to a double - is this possible?

Question

Just wondering in php, if it was possible to convert a string to a double. I am using a financial web service which provides a price as a string. I really need to process this as a double and was wondering how i would convert it

thanks

Answer 1

Just use floatval().

E.g.:

$var = '122.34343'; $float_value_of_var = floatval($var); echo $float_value_of_var; // 122.34343 

And in case you wonder doubleval() is just an alias for floatval().

And as the other say, in a financial application, float values are critical as these are not precise enough. E.g. adding two floats could result in something like 12.30000000001 and this error could propagate.

Answer 2

For arbitrary precision mathematics PHP offers the Binary Calculator which supports numbers of any size and precision, represented as strings.

$s = '1234.13'; $double = bcadd($s,'0',2); 

PHP: bcadd