How to Parse Monetary Values with Precision in PHP: A Localization-Aware Approach?

Parsing Monetary Values with Precision in PHP

Parsing financial data with varying formats can be a challenge, especially when considering locale-specific separators. This issue arises when trying to convert a string representation of money, such as "75,25 €", into a floating-point value.

While the common approach involves using parsefloat() after replacing commas with dots, it falls short when dealing with locales that use commas as decimal separators. To address this limitation, a more comprehensive solution is required.

A Localization-Aware Solution

The proposed solution addresses the need for localization awareness by relying on regular expressions to extract the numeric value from the input string. It effectively handles both commas and dots as decimal separators, preserving the correct representation regardless of the locale.

public function getAmount($money)
{
    $cleanString = preg_replace('/([^0-9\.,])/i', '', $money);
    $onlyNumbersString = preg_replace('/([^0-9])/i', '', $money);

    $separatorsCountToBeErased = strlen($cleanString) - strlen($onlyNumbersString) - 1;

    $stringWithCommaOrDot = preg_replace('/([,\.])/', '', $cleanString, $separatorsCountToBeErased);
    $removedThousandSeparator = preg_replace('/(\.|,)(?=[0-9]{3,}$)/', '',  $stringWithCommaOrDot);

    return (float) str_replace(',', '.', $removedThousandSeparator);
}

Testing the Solution

To validate its effectiveness, the solution was tested with various input formats, including:

['1,10 USD', 1.10],
['1 000 000.00', 1000000.0],
[' 000 000.21', 1000000.21],
['£1.10', 1.10],
['3 456 789', 123456789.0],
['3,456,789.12', 123456789.12],
['3 456 789,12', 123456789.12],
['1.10', 1.1],
[',,,,.10', .1],
['1.000', 1000.0],
['1,000', 1000.0]

The results demonstrate the solution's ability to extract floating-point values accurately, irrespective of the input format.

Limitations and Source

While the solution excels in handling various locales, it does have a limitation regarding decimals with more than two digits. The codebase is available at https://github.com/mcuadros/currency-detector, providing a practical implementation for parsing monetary values in diverse locales.

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