In a project we are working on we needed a way to extract the number portion of a weight from a string. So we could receive any of the following:
21
21 lbs
21.3
21.3 lbs
We started looking into some regular expressions to do the job, but then ran across a page saying that you can just cast it to a float or int and it will drop the string bit automatically like so:
<?php
$string = “22.8 lbs”;
echo (float)$string;
?>
<?php
$string = “22.8 lbs”;
echo (float)$string;
?>
This should output 22.8. Not perfect for every situation, but pretty handy in the right one.