Human readable number formatting in PHP
Numbers are tricky. Numbers are tricky because they have been used as a metric for a lot of things. Currency, scale, weather, science to name a few. And since numbers are associated with several different things, it’s important to represent them in a way humans can understand.
For instance, if a number is associated with a currency, it can be coupled with the respective currency symbol (e.g. 20 USD or $20). Or as the numbers get larger, we break them into thousand, million, billion, and so on.
Fortunately for us, it’s quite easy to work with these scenarios in PHP using a relatively lesser popular NumberFormatter class. And that’s what I’m going to cover in this article.
The NumberFormatter class
The NumberFormatter class has been shipped since PHP 5 and onwards. The class consists of numerous methods using which you can format numbers, currencies, and percentages according to the specified or default locale.
Here’s how the class would look like.
class NumberFormatter {
/* Methods */
public __construct(string $locale, int $style, ?string $pattern = null)
public static create(string $locale, int $style, ?string $pattern = null): ?NumberFormatter
public formatCurrency(float $amount, string $currency): string|false
public format(int|float $num, int $type = NumberFormatter::TYPE_DEFAULT): string|false
public getAttribute(int $attribute): int|float|false
public getErrorCode(): int
public getErrorMessage(): string
public getLocale(int $type = ULOC_ACTUAL_LOCALE): string|false
public getPattern(): string|false
public getSymbol(int $symbol): string|false
public getTextAttribute(int $attribute): string|false
public parseCurrency(string $string, string &$currency, int &$offset = null): float|false
public parse(string $string, int $type = NumberFormatter::TYPE_DOUBLE, int &$offset = null): int|float|false
public setAttribute(int $attribute, int|float $value): bool
public setPattern(string $pattern): bool
public setSymbol(int $symbol, string $value): bool
public setTextAttribute(int $attribute, string $value): bool
}
Since NumberFormatter is locale-sensitive, you need to create a new NumberFormatter for each locale.
Important: One thing to note here is, to use this class, you must install the intl extension on your machine. Otherwise, PHP won’t be able to find this class when you try to utilize it.
Now, we will see all the things you can do using this class.
Human-readable number representation
Like I mentioned earlier, we humans tend to express bigger numbers in form of thousands (K), millions (M), billions (B), and so on.
So, for instance, if we want to represent 10000 as 10K, here’s how we can do it using the NumberFormatter class.
$human_readable = new \NumberFormatter(
'en_US',
\NumberFormatter::PADDING_POSITION
);
echo $human_readable->format(10000); // 10K
echo $human_readable->format(1000000); // 1M
echo $human_readable->format(1000000000); // 1B
Here, the first argument is the locale (en_US in our case) and the second argument is the style in which we want to represent the number.
Spell-out Numbers
It’s also possible to spell out any number just by changing the style like so.
$spell_out = new \NumberFormatter(
'en_US',
\NumberFormatter::SPELLOUT
);
echo $spell_out->format(11300);
// Outputs: eleven thousand three hundred
Currency formatting
We can use this class to print numbers that consist of a certain currency. Here’s how 100 can be represented as US Dollars.
$currency = new \NumberFormatter(
'en_US',
\NumberFormatter::CURRENCY
);
echo $currency->format(100); // $100.00
Or if we use a European locale…
$currency = new \NumberFormatter(
'en_IT',
\NumberFormatter::CURRENCY
);
echo $currency->format(100); // €100.00
You can format from one currency (Euro) to another currency (USD) like so.
$currency = new \NumberFormatter(
'en_IT',
\NumberFormatter::CURRENCY
);
echo $currency->formatCurrency(100, "USD");
// $100.00
Scientific format
Numbers can even be formatted in the scientific format.
$scintific_format = new \NumberFormatter(
'en_US',
\NumberFormatter::SCIENTIFIC
);
echo $scintific_format->format(1000);
// 1E7
Time representation
A number (in seconds) can be represented as a time duration counterpart of it.
$time_format = new \NumberFormatter(
'en_US',
\NumberFormatter::DURATION
);
echo $time_format->format(1000);
// 16:40
As you can see, it prints “16:40” which means “16 minutes, 40 seconds”.
Conclusion
There are a lot of other styles that you can use with this class apart from what I have mention in this article. So, play around with it and you might end up with something you might be looking for.
Though the NumberFormatter class is not new, it’s sort of underutilized in my opinion. Maybe because the documentation of it is not that great with very few or non-existent examples.
But if used well, it can easily satisfy your number-formatting needs in PHP!
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