What potential pitfalls should PHP beginners be aware of when trying to manipulate and display numerical data in a specific format?

One potential pitfall for PHP beginners when manipulating and displaying numerical data in a specific format is not properly handling data types. PHP is a loosely typed language, so it's important to ensure that the data being manipulated is of the correct type to avoid unexpected results. To solve this issue, beginners should use type casting functions like intval(), floatval(), or number_format() to explicitly convert data types and format numerical data as needed.

// Example code snippet demonstrating proper type casting and formatting of numerical data
$number = "123.45"; // Numerical data stored as a string
$floatNumber = floatval($number); // Convert string to float
$formattedNumber = number_format($floatNumber, 2); // Format float to display 2 decimal places

echo $formattedNumber; // Output: 123.45