What are some potential pitfalls when working with floats in PHP, especially when dealing with precision?

When working with floats in PHP, especially when dealing with precision, a potential pitfall is the loss of precision due to the way floating-point numbers are represented in binary. To avoid this issue, it is recommended to use the BCMath or GMP extension for arbitrary precision arithmetic. 

// Using the BCMath extension for arbitrary precision arithmetic
$float1 = '0.1';
$float2 = '0.2';

$sum = bcadd($float1, $float2, 10); // Specify the precision as the third argument

echo $sum; // Output: 0.3

Keywords

floats precision rounding errors type juggling IEEE 754

Related Questions