method giving price as a string, and not a float - php

Question

I am returning JSON from this array, but the value of total is in string format - not a float. Not sure what I am doing wrong here.
This is the array, which ends up having a string:
return [
'cart' => [
'total' => amount($cart->total)
]
]
And this is the amount helper method, where the issue is coming from:
function amount($money)
{
return number_format(floatval($money), 2);
}
I am expecting a float back from total, not a string.

Answer 1

number_format returns a string.
In your case, you might be passing a value such as 3.15 in which case a string would seem to be an odd output. But, if you passed a value like 311583249 you would see why this is the case: number_format(311583249) returns "311,583,249".
It returns a string every time for continuity. If it returned an integer when there's a whole number less than 1,000, or a a float when there's a partial number less than 1,000, then that would be more difficult to account for overall and not serve the exact purpose that number_format has - so a string is always returned by number_format.
What you might be looking for instead would be round(X, 2); this would return a float with the precision of 2. Or maybe you're looking for money_format('%i', X) - this also returns a string but formatted as if it were money.

Answer 2

That's normal. In this case, if you break down the types of everything you're executing like so:
var_dump(1000000.12);
var_dump(floatval(1000000.12));
var_dump(number_format(floatval(1000000.12), 2));
Then you will notice that number_format is the point at which it becomes a string, given the comma delimitation:
float(1000000.12)
float(1000000.12)
string(12) "1,000,000.12"
Also this may be useful for you as an alternative approach.