how to transform a string into a float.

[Anon]

hello all.

i've got a little problem with a mysql query that is getting a 'quantity' field value, which is of a 'float' type ;

"select quantity from disk_usage limit 1"

while($data = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
$QUANTITY = $data[quantity];
}

weirdly, the type of this variable is a string... the problem is that I wish to perform various operations on this value (round), and for that, I need a float.

Why is PHP automatically transform the variable type ? I already tried to bypass this by using someting like ;

$QUANTITY = round((double)$QUANTITY, 2);, but it fails.

Thanks for any help.

[rrijnders]

PHP should automatically cast the variable into the proper type depending on it's usage. What errors are you getting?

You shouldn't need to, but you can first try to trim blanks off the returned value so it can be cast correctly:
<b>$QUANTITY = trim($QUANTITY);</b>

or you can explicitly cast the value yourself:
<b>$QUANTITY2 = (float) $QUANTITY;</b>

HTH
-- Rich