Hi all:
Since I'm relatively new to PHP, I'm not familiar with all of the shortcuts
and efficient ways one could write a routine that handles converting data from
one format into another, so I thought I'd ask here for recommendations on how
to solve one particular issue I've got. I'm viewing this as a learning
experience for me.
I've got some text fields coming in that need to be added to a table as
numeric fields. In particular, I've got to process dollar amounts that appear
with dollar signs and commas into their strictly numeric forms. For example:
$123,456.78 becomes 123456.78
$24,680 becomes 24680
1234B becomes 1234
(That last example is an actual example of something I saw in the data
file; I can only assume that the user wanted 1234, as that's the closest value
I can assume from what was typed in.)
What is the fastest, most efficient way to perform these conversions? I'm
coming at PHP from "old school" experience where I'd normally read through the
text character by character and return a value built from only the characters I
have declared as acceptable (i.e., 0-9 and . and possibly a -), but I've got to
believe that there's some technique -- or possibly a deeply buried function --
available to me now that would be faster and easier to implement.
Any help you can provide will, as always, be greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
Jon
