What are the potential pitfalls of relying on standard arithmetic operators in PHP for precise calculations with decimal numbers?

When dealing with decimal numbers in PHP, using standard arithmetic operators like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division can lead to precision issues due to the way floating-point numbers are represented internally. To avoid these pitfalls, it is recommended to use the BCMath extension in PHP, which provides arbitrary precision mathematics functions for working with decimal numbers. 

$number1 = '0.1';
$number2 = '0.2';

$sum = bcadd($number1, $number2, 2); // Add two numbers with precision of 2 decimal places

echo $sum; // Output: 0.3

Keywords

floating point precision round BCMath errors

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