How does PHP automatically convert data types when formatting numbers with punctuation?

When formatting numbers with punctuation in PHP, the language automatically converts data types to strings. This means that if you have a number and you want to add punctuation such as commas to make it more readable, PHP will handle the conversion for you. You can achieve this by using the number_format() function in PHP, which allows you to format numbers with specified decimal points, thousands separators, and decimal separators.

$number = 1000000;
$formatted_number = number_format($number);
echo $formatted_number; // Output: 1,000,000