This is killing me! I've never had so much trouble and I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong here.
If I have a number, say 2.32, and I want to do math with it it won't work out. The very simplest example:
$income = $commission; //Commission is 2.32, retrieved from XML
echo "income: $income<br>";
$income100 = $income*100;
echo "income100: $income100<br>";
The result I get is:
income: 2.32
income100: 200
How can I use a decimal number accurately with math without it changing it?
Thanks so much!
You need to assign $income in the following manner to get rid of the underlying SimpleXMLElement:
$income = (float) $commission;
Example of what happens when you don't:
$x = simplexml_load_string("<a>2.4</a>");
echo $x * 100; // output: 200
Besides using floats as Tim said, also make sure to use the BC Math functions when performing arithmetic operation on floating point numbers. Specifically bcmul():
$income100 = bcmul($income, 100);
The problem with floating-point numbers is that you cannot represent decimal numbers with them (unless it can be written as a/b for integer a and b, and even then only if abs(a) < pow(2,52) and b is a power of 2).
You may be better off using string functions to get an integer value:
$tmp = explode(".",$commission);
$tmp = intval($tmp[0].str_pad(substr($tmp[1],0,2),2,"0"));
This will split up the integer part from the decimal part, ensure the decima part is two digits long, and shove it on the end of the integer part, thus effectively multiplying the original number by 100.
I think the easiest solution would be to cast it to a float with floatval()
$income = floatval($comission)
leave the rest of the code as is and it should work as intended.
Related
Yesterday I was helping some one and got a weird error which I could not explain to him how it worked.
The code (tested on 3 machines (PHP 5.3 and PHP 5.4))
// (float)65.35
$percentage = round(65.351, 2);
// (float) 6535
$total = $percentage * 100;
// (int) 6534
$int = (int) $total;
What is suspected was that the int value would be 6535 but it ended up being 6534.
Could some one explain what is going on?
You don't actually have 65.35 after the first operation.
>>> '%.20f' % (65.351 - 0.001,)
'65.34999999999999431566'
Either start with an integral value scaled appropriately in the first place, don't attempt to convert the value to an integer, or add a small value before taking the integer value.
This has to do with how floating point (read the warning in this link!) values are stored in memory. Indeed after the first operation you don't have an exact decimal value, but a rounded value. Probably 65.34999999 or so. (The value is stored as a list of bits (0/1))
This is why when talking about money, developers don't store dollars/euros but rather the amount of cents. This way they avoid working with floats that are less precise for decimals, but rather work with integers, that are precise.
Use round instead of int
round($total)
$r=$explode('.',$total);
debug($r);
I'm working with currency input. Only two digits after decimal mark should be used. I tried casting input to float and multiplying by 100, which works fine until someone enters more than two digits after decimal mark:
// Returns 6999.8 instead of 6999
$cents = floatval('69.998') * 100;
Then I tried casting result to int, so sequential digits after decimal point are ignored. It solves above problem ('69.998' becomes 6999), but creates a new one with float to integer conversion:
// Returns 6998 instead of 6999
$cents = intval(floatval('69.99') * 100);
I also considered floor(), but it triggers the same float issue as intval().
This is what I'm thinking about using:
$cents = intval((string)(floatval('69.99') * 100));
It works in both cases, but feels like a hack and it's late and my head hurts so maybe I'm missing something obvious here. Is there a better way to do this?
Is
$cents = intval(round(floatval('69.99') * 100));
what you need?
You can also specify the precision. For example, in your case you mentioned you would like to round the original to two decimal places:
$twodecimal = round(floatval('69.998'),2);//returns a float representation of 70
Be sure to have a look at the big red notice in these docs
It's because 69.99 * 100 has a floating-point representation of 6998.9999999* (off: you can check it at a javascript console too). If you want to be precise, you should use a fixed-point number with a php-extension, like BCMath - or, you can write a simple regexp for this specific problem
$amount = '69.99';
if (preg_match('/^(-?\d+)(\.(\d{1,2}))?/', $amount, $matches))
{
$amount = (int) ($matches[1] . (isset($matches[3]) ? str_pad($matches[3], 2, '0') : '00'));
}
else
{
$amount = ((int) $amount) * 100;
}
$cents = intval(round(floatval('69.99') * 100));
This would get it to the nearest number correctly, this is because of floating pointer precision problems as 69.99 is probably represented in memory to be something like 69.9899999
intval just truncates the remaining parts of the decimal, so 69.989999 * 100 becomes 6998.9999 and gets truncated to 6998
I would recommend that you use an integer to contain a currency value. Using floats can rapidly lead to rounding errors.
In the applications that I have seen, an integer is used with an assumed decimal point. All values are held to the nearest unit of currency such as the cent for US dollars or the Euro. There are currencies which do not have a decimal point and there are a couple that rather than two decimal places have three decimal places.
By manipulating with integers with an assumed decimal place, you can really reduce rounding errors and other issues that can be seen with floating point.
To do conversion, I recommend using string manipulation and removing the decimal point with string manipulation as well as performing a check to ensure that only the desired number of places are entered.
Given the following cod:
$number = 1050.55;
var_dump($number - floor($number));
Why does the above code returns the following result?
float(0.54999999999995)
I want a fixed value like 0.55 in this case. Can you help me please?
Floating point operations are not precise and the remainder errors are common.
If you know, what is your desired precission (eg. two digits after the dot), you can use round() function on the result.
In this case this will be:
$number = 1050.55;
var_dump(round($number - floor($number), 2));
For most floats, binary can only approximately represent the correct number. The rule is to perform floor(), ceil() or fmod() last in a series of calculations. At least only do integer math after you use them. If you cast an int to a float, as in your code, then floor() is not going to behave has you expect.
Use printf() when printing floats. Its conversion routines usually do a much better job and give you the answer you expect when truncating floats.
EDIT: Or, to be more exact, printf() works on the decimal character representation of the number when deciding where to truncate so you don't get any weird, unspecified, binary/decimal conversion artifacts.
See this question. While that is about java and you're asking about PHP the math is the same.
I've been wrestling with PHP's ceil() function giving me slightly wrong results - consider the following:
$num = 2.7*3; //float(8.1)
$num*=10; //float(81)
$num = ceil($num); //82, but shouldn't this be 81??
$num/=10; //float(8.2)
I have a number which may have any number of decimal places, and I need it rounded up to one decimal place.
i.e 8.1 should be 8.1, 8.154 should be 8.2, and 8 should be left as 8.
How I've been getting there is to take the number, multiply by 10, ceil() it, then divide by ten but as you can see I'm getting an extra .1 added in some circumstances.
Can anyone tell my why this is happening, and how to fix it?
Any help greatly appreciated
EDIT: had +=10 instead of *=10 :S
EDIT 2:
I didn't explicitly mention this but I need the decimal to ALWAYS round UP, never down - this answer is closest so far:
rtrim(rtrim(sprintf('%.1f', $num), '0'), '.');
However rounds 3.84 down to 3.8 when I need 3.9.
Sorry this wasn't clearer :(
Final Edit:
What I ended up doing was this:
$num = 2.7*3; //float(8.1)
$num*=10; //float(81)
$num = ceil(round($num, 2)); //81 :)
$num/=10; //float(8.1)
Which works :)
This is more than likely due to floating point error.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/42980
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E19957-01/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.html
http://joshblog.net/2007/01/30/flash-floating-point-number-errors/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point
You may have luck trying this procedure instead.
<?php
$num = 2.7*3;
echo rtrim(rtrim(sprintf('%.1f', $num), '0'), '.');
Floats can be a fickle thing. Not all real numbers can be properly represented in a finite number of binary bits.
As it turns out, a decimal section of 0.7 is one of those numbers (comes out 0.10 with an infinity repeating "1100" after it). You end up with a number that's ever so slightly above 0.7, so when you multiply by 10, you have a one's digit slightly above 7.
What you can do is make a sanity check. Take you float digit and subtract it's integer form. If the resulting value is less than, say, 0.0001, consider it to be an internal rounding error and leave it as-is. If the result is greater than 0.0001, apply ceil() normally.
Edit: A fun example you can do if you're on windows to show this is to open up the built in calculator application. Put in "4" then apply a square root function (with x^y where y=0.5). You'll see it properly displays "2". Now, subtract 2 from it and you'll see that you don't have 0 as a result. This is caused by internal rounding errors when it attempted to compute the square root of 4. When displaying the number 2 earlier, it knew that those very distant trailing digits were probably a rounding error, but when those are all that's left, it gets a bit confused.
(Before anybody gets onto me about this, I understand that this is oversimplified, but nonetheless I consider it a decent example.)
Convert your number to a string and ceil the string.
function roundUp($number, $decimalPlaces){
$multi = pow(10, $decimalPlaces);
$nrAsStr = ($number * $multi) . "";
return ceil($nrAsStr) / $multi;
}
The problem is that floating point numbers are RARELY what you expect them to be. Your 2.7*3 is probably coming out to be something like 81.0000000000000000001, which ceil()'s up to 82. For this sort of thing, you'll have to wrap your ceil/round/floor calls with some precision checks, to handle those extra microscopic differences.
Use %f instead of %.1f.
echo rtrim(rtrim(sprintf('%f', $num), '0'), '.');
Why not try this:
$num = 2.7*3;
$num *= 100;
$num = floor($num);
$num /= 10;
$num = ceil($num);
$num /= 10;
I have a small financial application with PHP as the front end and MySQL as the back end. I have ancient prejudices, and I store money values in MySQL as an integer of cents. My HTML forms allow input of dollar values, like "156.64" and I use PHP to convert that to cents and then I store the cents in the database.
I have a function that both cleans the dollar value from the form, and converts it to cents. I strip leading text, I strip trailing text, I multiply by 100 and convert to an integer. That final step is
$cents = (integer) ($dollars * 100);
This works fine for almost everything, except for a very few values like '156.64' which consistently converts to 15663 cents. Why does it do this?
If I do this:
$cents = (integer) ($dollars * 100 + 0.5);
then it consistently works. Why do I need to add that rounding value?
Also, my prejudices about storing money amounts as integers and not floating point values, is that no longer needed? Will modern float calculations produce nicely rounded and accurate money values adequate for keeping 100% accurate accounting?
If you want precision, you should store your money values using the DECIMAL data type in MySQL.
Your "prejudices" about floats will never be overcome - it's fundamental to the way they work. Without going into too much detail, they store a number based on powers of two and since not all decimal number can be presented this way, it doesn't always work. Your only reliable solution is to store the number as a sequence of digits and the location of the decimal point (as per DECIMAL type mentioned above).
I'm not 100% on the PHP, but is it possible the multiplication is converting the ints to floats and hence introducing exactly the problem you're trying to avoid?
Currency/money values should never be stored in a database (or used in a program) as floats.
Your integer method is fine, as is using a DECIMAL, NUMERIC or MONEY type where available.
Your problem is caused by $dollars being treated as a float and PHP doesn't have a better type to deal with money. Depending on when $dollars is being assigned, it could be being treated as a string or a float, but is certainly converted to a float if it's still a string for the * 100 operation if it looks like a float.
You might be better off parsing the string to an integer "money" value yourself (using a regex) instead of relying on the implicit conversions which PHP is doing.
The code you posted does the multiplication first, forcing a floating point calculation that introduces error, before converting the value to an integer. Instead, you should avoid floating point arithmetic entirely by reversing the order. Convert to integer values first, then perform the arithmetic.
Assuming previous code already validated and formatted the input, try this:
list($bills, $pennies) = explode('.', $dollars);
$cents = 100 * $bills + $pennies;
Your prejudice against floating point values to represent money is well founded because of truncation and because of values being converted from base-10 to base-2 and back again.
Casting does not round() as in round-to-nearest, it truncates at the decimal: (int)3.99 yields 3. (int)-3.99 yields -3.
Since float arithmetic often induces error (and possibly not in the direction you want), use round() if you want reliable rounding.
You should never ever store currency in floating point, because it always get results you don't expect.
Check out php BC Maths, it allow you to store your currency as string, then perform very high precision arithmetic on them.
Instead of using
$cents = (integer) ($dollars * 100);
you may want to try to use:
$cents = bcmul($dollars, 100, 2);
When converting from float to integer, the number will be rounded towards zero (src).
Read the Floating point precision warning.
There's no point in storing money as integer if you enter it through a floating point operation (no pun intended). If you want to convert from string to int and be consistent with your "prejudice" you can simply use string functions.
You can use an arbitrary precision library to divide by 10 (they handle numbers internally as strings), e.g. bcdiv() or gmp_div_q(), but of course, you could have also used it from the beginning for all the math.
Or you can use plain string functions:
<?php
// Quick ugly code not fully tested
$input = '156.64';
$output = NULL;
if( preg_match('/\d+(\.\d+)?/', $input) ){
$tmp = explode('.', $input);
switch( count($tmp) ){
case 1:
$output = $tmp[0];
break;
case 2:
$output = $tmp[0] . substr($tmp[1], 0, 2);
break;
default:
echo "Invalid decimal\n";
}
}else{
echo "Invalid number\n";
}
var_dump($output);
?>