Converting a number with comma as decimal point to float

Question

I have a list of prices with a comma for a decimal point and a dot as the thousand separator.

Some examples:

12,30
116,10
1.563,14

These come in this format from a third party. I want to convert them to floats and add them together.

What is the best way to do this? number_format doesn't seem to work with this format, and str_replace seems like overkill, as I have to do it more that once on each number.

Is there are better way? Thanks.

Answer 1

Using str_replace() to remove the dots is not overkill.

$string_number = '1.512.523,55';
// NOTE: You don't really have to use floatval() here, it's just to prove that it's a legitimate float value.
$number = floatval(str_replace(',', '.', str_replace('.', '', $string_number)));

// At this point, $number is a "natural" float.
print $number;

This is almost certainly the least CPU-intensive way you can do this, and odds are that even if you use some fancy function to do it, that this is what it does under the hood.