[ale] PHP rounding in an imagestring

[Phil Turmel]

On 12/28/2014 11:24 AM, William Bagwell wrote:
> Is this even possible? Warning, dove in and spliced code snippets from 
> various sources with zero experience:-O Must say PHP is an order of 
> magnitude easier to learn than Perl. And two orders less headache inducing!
> 
> On a forum where many of the regulars have signature banners with statistics 
> and stuff related to the forums topic. Wanting one that is totally unique so 
> started with 
>      $now = time(); // or your date as well
>      $your_date = strtotime("2010-01-01");
>      $datediff = $now - $your_date;
>      echo floor($datediff/(60*60*24));
> modified the forth line to match some code found elsewhere.
>      imagestring($im, 3, $left_margin, 18, $datediff/(60*60*24), $black);
> Amazingly it works but returns 8 unneeded decimal places. Nothing I tried 
> would remove them and in searching I found a completed script on a rival 
> forum for the same topic. They declare every thing first so no math occurs 
> inside an imagestring. Probably the route I need to take but want to ask 
> before abandoning my much shorter script.

What you are experiencing is implicit conversion.  The imagestring
function is defined to take a *string* to turn into an image, and you
are giving it a number.  Unlike C or other formally-typed languages, PHP
doesn't mind, it just converts the result to a string for you.

What you want is to deliver a *formatted* string to the imagestring
function.  PHP offers a variety of functions that'll do that, but the
simplest is probably what you want:

http://php.net/manual/en/function.number-format.php

So, wrap your expression with the number_format() function to limit the
decimal places.  For two decimal places, like this:

imagestring($im, 3, $left_margin, 18,
number_format($datediff/(60*60*24), 2), $black);

Enjoy!

Phil