ZEND PHP 5 Certification STUDY GUIDE

84 ” Strings And Patterns
Formatting Strings
PHP provides a number of different functions that can be used to format output in a
variety of ways. Some of them are designed to handle special data types—for example,
numbers of currency values—while others provide a more generic interface for
formatting strings according to more complex rules.
Formatting rules are sometimes governed by locale considerations. For example,
most English-speaking countries format numbers by using commas as the separators
between thousands, and the point as a separator between the integer portion
of a number and its fractional part. In many European countries, this custom is reversed:
the dot (or a space) separates thousands, and the comma is the fractional
delimiter.
In PHP, the current locale is set by calling the setlocale() function, which takes
two parameters: the name of the locale you want to set and a category that indicates
which functions are affected by the change. For example, you can affect currency
formatting (which we’ll examine in a few paragraphs) to reflect the standard US rules
by calling setlocale() as in the following example:
setlocale (LC_MONETARY, ’en_US’);
Formatting Numbers
Number formatting is typically used when you wish to output a number and separate
its digits into thousands and decimal points. The number_format() function, used for
this purpose, is not locale-aware. This means that, even if you have a French or
German locale set , it will still use periods for decimals and commas for thousands,
unless you specify otherwise.
The number_format() function accepts 1, 2 or 4 arguments (but not three). If only
one argument is given, the default formatting is used: the number will be rounded
to the nearest integer, and a comma will be used to separate thousands. If two arguments
are given, the number will be rounded to the given number of decimal places
and a period and comma will be used to separate decimals and thousands, respectively.
Should you pass in all four parameters, the number will be rounded to the
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