I'm having a weird problem where PHP's sprintf seems to be changing some numbers. This doesn't happen all the time, just occasionally.
The following code:
echo sprintf('%04d',$product['priceUSD']*100)."(".($product['priceUSD']*100).")";
generates the following output for a $19.99 product: 1998(1999)
I can work around this, but I'd love to know why it is doing it, and if there's any method to the apparent madness.
Update:
It looks like it's happening when converting from float to int. The following gives the same output:
echo (int)($product['priceUSD']*100)."(".($product['priceUSD']*100).")";
echo sprintf('%.2f',$product['priceUSD']*100)."(".sprintf('%.2f',$product['priceUSD']*100).")";
What number format are you looking for?
First off: %d is kinda like an (int) cast.
19.99 = 1.99899999999999984368059813278E1 = 0x4033FD70A3D70A3D
in IEEE 64 Bit.
if we multiply that in floating point with 100 we get 1998.99999999999984368059813278E1 casted to int is 1998.
"19.99 is just one of those numbers..." (see #Dragons Link)
for exact results use bcmath extension:
echo sprintf('%4d', bcmul ($price,100));
To stabilize your multiplication while facing floating point arithmetic problems, leverage the bcmul() function to multiply the two numbers.
Secondarily, I should mention that printf() will perform rounding, but (int) will not.
Code: (Demo)
$product['priceUSD'] = '19.99';
printf('%04d', bcmul($product['priceUSD'], 100));
Output:
1999
Related
PHP is erroring out on me when working with small decimals / floats. Take the following code:
$spotPrices['entry'] = 1.6591;
$price['o'] = 1.65908;
$currentresult = $spotPrices['entry'] - $price['o'];
echo $currentresult;
I would expect this to output 0.00002 (the answer). But instead it outputs: -1.99999999999E-5
Why is it doing this and, more importantly, how can I get the correct result?
I've done some searching on the forums and seen that floating points give PHP fits but haven't seen a solution or workaround that seems to answer my question.
My calculator is saying that the result should be 0.00002
use number_format:
$currentresult = number_format($spotPrices['entry'] - $price['o'], 8);
Instead of 0.00002 you get 1.9999999999909E-5 which is 0.000019999999999909. This is due to floating point precision. Precision is platform-dependent. You can read up on it here: http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.float.php
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.
How come the result for
intval("19.90"*100)
is
1989
and not 1990 as one would expect (PHP 5.2.14)?
That's because 19.90 is not exactly representable in base 2 and the closest approximation is slightly lower than 19.90.
Namely, this closest approximation is exactly 2^-48 × 0x13E66666666666. You can see its exact value in decimal form here, if you're interested.
This rounding error is propagated when you multiply by 100. intval will force a cast of the float to an integer, and such casts always rounds towards 0, which is why you see 1989. Use round instead.
You can also use bc* function for working with float :
$var = bcmul("19.90", "100");
echo intval($var);
intval converts doubles to integers by truncating the fractional component of the number. When dealing with some values, this can give odd results. Consider the following:
print intval ((0.1 + 0.7) * 10);
This will most likely print out 7, instead of the expected value of 8.
For more information, see the section on floating point numbers in the PHP manual
Why are you using intval on a floating point number? I agree with you that the output is a little off but it has to do with the relative inprecision of floating point numbers.
Why not just use floatval("19.90"*100) which outputs 1990
I believe the php doc at http://de2.php.net/manual/en/function.intval.php is omitting the fact that intval will not deliver "the integer value" but the integer (that is non-fractional) part of the number. It does not round.
I am confused as to why:
echo log10(238328) / log10(62);
results in 3
but
echo floor(log10(238328) / log10(62));
results in 2
I know floor rounds down but I thought it was only for decimal numbers.
How can I get an answer of 3 out of the latter statment whilst still normally rounding down?
PHP uses double-precision floating point numbers. Neither of the results of the two logarithms can be represented exactly, so the result of dividing them is not exact. The result you get is close to, but slightly less than 3. This gets rounded to 3 when being formatted by echo. floor, however returns 2.
You can avoid the inexact division by taking advantage of the fact that log(x, b) / log(y, b) is equivalent to log(x, y) (for any base b). This gives you the the expression log(238328, 62) instead, which has a floating point result of exactly 3 (the correct result since 238328 is pow(62, 3)).
It's due to the way floating point numbers are polished in PHP.
See the PHP Manual's Floating Point Numbers entry for more info
A workaround is to floor(round($value, 15));. Doing this will ensure that your number is polished quite accurately.
If you var_dump you'll see that the "3" is actually a float. Which means its probably close to 3 and rounded up. If you wanted 3, you would have to use the sister function, ceil.
You might get better results using the round() function and/or explicitly casting it to an int rather than relying on ceil(). Look here for more information: http://php.net/manual/en/language.types.integer.php
At the cost of a little performance, you could coerce it, reducing the precision to a more useful range by rounding or string formatting the number:
echo floor(round(log10(238328)/log10(62), 4));
echo floor(sprintf('%.4f', log10(238328)/log10(62)));
// output:
// 3
// 3
You should go with the minimum precision that you need. More precision is not what you want. Rounding without flooring might be more correct, the results are different depending on precision.
echo floor(round(log10(238328)/log10(62), 16));
echo round(log10(238328)/log10(62), 16);
// output:
// 2
// 3
there three functions for doing nearly the same:
ceil --> ceil(0.2)==1 && ceil(0.8)==1
floor --> floor(0.2)==0 && floor(0.8)==0
round --> round(0.2)==0 && round(0.8)==1
Because the float data type in PHP is inaccurate, and a FLOAT in MySQL takes up more space than an INT (and is inaccurate), I always store prices as INTs, multipling by 100 before storing to ensure we have exactly 2 decimal places of precision. However I believe PHP is misbehaving. Example code:
echo "<pre>";
$price = "1.15";
echo "Price = ";
var_dump($price);
$price_corrected = $price*100;
echo "Corrected price = ";
var_dump($price_corrected);
$price_int = intval(floor($price_corrected));
echo "Integer price = ";
var_dump($price_int);
echo "</pre>";
Produced output:
Price = string(4) "1.15"
Corrected price = float(115)
Integer price = int(114)
I was surprised. When the final result was lower than expected by 1, I was expecting the output of my test to look more like:
Price = string(4) "1.15"
Corrected price = float(114.999999999)
Integer price = int(114)
which would demonstrate the inaccuracy of the float type. But why is floor(115) returning 114??
Try this as a quick fix:
$price_int = intval(floor($price_corrected + 0.5));
The problem you are experiencing is not PHP's fault, all programming languages using real numbers with floating point arithmetics have similar issues.
The general rule of thumb for monetary calculations is to never use floats (neither in the database nor in your script). You can avoid all kinds of problems by always storing the cents instead of dollars. The cents are integers, and you can freely add them together, and multiply by other integers. Whenever you display the number, make sure you insert a dot in front of the last two digits.
The reason why you are getting 114 instead of 115 is that floor rounds down, towards the nearest integer, thus floor(114.999999999) becomes 114. The more interesting question is why 1.15 * 100 is 114.999999999 instead of 115. The reason for that is that 1.15 is not exactly 115/100, but it is a very little less, so if you multiply by 100, you get a number a tiny bit smaller than 115.
Here is a more detailed explanation what echo 1.15 * 100; does:
It parses 1.15 to a binary floating point number. This involves rounding, it happens to round down a little bit to get the binary floating point number nearest to 1.15. The reason why you cannot get an exact number (without rounding error) is that 1.15 has infinite number of numerals in base 2.
It parses 100 to a binary floating point number. This involves rounding, but since 100 is a small integer, the rounding error is zero.
It computes the product of the previous two numbers. This also involves a little rounding, to find the nearest binary floating point number. The rounding error happens to be zero in this operation.
It converts the binary floating point number to a base 10 decimal number with a dot, and prints this representation. This also involves a little rounding.
The reason why PHP prints the surprising Corrected price = float(115) (instead of 114.999...) is that var_dump doesn't print the exact number (!), but it prints the number rounded to n - 2 (or n - 1) digits, where n digits is the precision of the calculation. You can easily verify this:
echo 1.15 * 100; # this prints 115
printf("%.30f", 1.15 * 100); # you 114.999....
echo 1.15 * 100 == 115.0 ? "same" : "different"; # this prints `different'
echo 1.15 * 100 < 115.0 ? "less" : "not-less"; # this prints `less'
If you are printing floats, remember: you don't always see all digits when you print the float.
See also the big warning near the beginning of the PHP float docs.
The other answers have covered the cause and a good workaround to the problem, I believe.
To aim at fixing the problem from a different angle:
For storing price values in MySQL, you should probably look at the DECIMAL type, which lets you store exact values with decimal places.
Maybe it's another possible solution for this "problem":
intval(number_format($problematic_float, 0, '', ''));
PHP is doing rounding based on significant digits. It's hiding the inaccuracy (on line 2). Of course, when floor comes along, it doesn't know any better and lops it all the way down.
As stated this is not a problem with PHP per se, It is more of an issue of handling fractions that can't be expressed as finite floating point values hence leading to loss of character when rounding up.
The solution is to ensure that when you are working on floating point values and you need to maintain accuracy - use the gmp functions or the BC maths functions - bcpow, bcmul et al. and the problem will be resolved easily.
E.g instead of
$price_corrected = $price*100;
use $price_corrected = bcmul($price,100);