php string to int

Question

$a = '88'; $b = '88 8888';  echo (int)$a; echo (int)$b; 

as expected, both produce 88. Anyone know if there's a string to int function that will work for $b's value and produce 888888? I've googled around a bit with no luck.

Thanks

Answer 1

You can remove the spaces before casting to int:

(int)str_replace(' ', '', $b); 

Also, if you want to strip other commonly used digit delimiters (such as ,), you can give the function an array (beware though -- in some countries, like mine for example, the comma is used for fraction notation):

(int)str_replace(array(' ', ','), '', $b); 

Answer 2

If you want to leave only numbers - use preg_replace like: (int)preg_replace("/[^\d]+/","",$b).