PHP Rounding Float - php

Question

I'm working on a system where I need to round down to the nearest penny financial payments. Naively I thought I would multiply up by 100, take the floor and then divide back down. However the following example is misbehaving:
echo 1298.34*100;
correctly shows:
129834
but
echo floor(1298.34*100);
unexpectedly shows:
129833
I get the same problem using intval for example.
I suspect the multiplication is falling foul of floating point rounding. But if I can't rely on multiplication, how can I do this? I always want to round down reliably, and I don't need to take negative amounts into consideration.
To be clear, I want any fractional penny amounts to be stripped off:
1298.345 should give 1298.34
1298.349 should give 1298.34
1298.342 should give 1298.34

Answer 1

Since you mention you only use this for displaying purposes, you could take the amount, turn it into a string and truncate anything past the second decimal. A regular expression could do the job:
preg_match('/\d+\.{0,1}\d{0,2}/', (string) $amount, $matches);
This expression works with any number of decimals (including zero). How it works in detail:
\d+ matches any number of digits
\.{0,1} matches 0 or 1 literal dot
\d{0,2} matches zero or two digits after the dot
You can run the following code to test it:
$amounts = [
1298,
1298.3,
1298.34,
1298.341,
1298.349279745,
];
foreach ($amounts as $amount) {
preg_match('/\d+\.{0,1}\d{0,2}/', (string) $amount, $matches);
var_dump($matches[0]);
}
Also available as a live test in this fiddle.

Answer 2

You can use round() to round to the required precision, and with the expected behavior when rounding the final 5 (which is another financial hurdle you might encounter).
$display = round(3895.0 / 3.0, 2);
Also, as a reminder, I have the habit of always writing floating point integers with a final dot or a ".0". This prevents some languages from inferring the wrong type and doing, say, integer division, so that 5 / 3 will yield 1.
If you need a "custom rounding" and want to be sure, well, the reason it didn't work is because not all floating point numbers exist in machine representation. 1298.34 does not exist; what does exist (I'm making the precise numbers up!) in its place might be 1298.33999999999999124.
So when you multiply it by 100 and get 129833.999999999999124, of course truncating it will yield 129833.
What you need to do then is to add a small quantity that must be enough to cover the machine error but not enough to matter in the financial calculation. There is an algorithm to determine this quantity, but you can probably get away with "one thousandth after upscaling".
So:
$display = floor((3895.0 / 3.0)*100.0 + 0.001);
Please be aware that this number, which you will "see" as 1234.56, might again not exist precisely. It might really be 1234.5600000000000123 or 1234.559999999999876. This might have consequences in complex, composite calculations.

Answer 3

Since You're working with financial, You should use some kind of Money library (https://github.com/moneyphp/money). Almost all other solutions are asking for trouble.
Other ways, which I don't recommend, are: a) use integers only, b) calculate with bcmath or c) use Number class from the Money library e.g.:
function getMoneyValue($value): string
{
if (!is_numeric($value)) {
throw new \RuntimeException(sprintf('Money value has to be a numeric value, "%s" given', is_object($value) ? get_class($value) : gettype($value)));
}
$number = \Money\Number::fromNumber($value)->base10(-2);
return $number->getIntegerPart();
}

Answer 4

he other function available is round(), which takes two parameters -
the number to round, and the number of decimal places to round to. If
a number is exactly half way between two integers, round() will always
round up.
use round :
echo round (1298.34*100);
result :
129834