Php Is Doing Some Weird Calculations

[Amezis 0]

Well, I am making a script that is doing lots of different calculations. Everything works, until I see something very strange:64 - 63.7035 = 0.29649999999999It's completely obvious that this is wrong. The answer should be 0.2965... Why does it do such a stupid error, and how can I fix it?

[Amezis 0]

After some testing, I discovered that with this code, it would work fine:

<?php$something = (64 - 63.7035);echo ("$something");?>

But my other code, which do the wrong calculation, is way longer. I don't know why... I've checked the variable, which should be 63.7035 and not 63.7035000000001, and it is correct.

By the way: It only happens with that number, I've tried with some other ones, but only the one I showed shows a wrong answer. I believe there's nothing to do with it...

[beeseven 0]

It's because of the way computers store numbers. They use binary, so sometimes you can't get a completely accurate number. The way that binary works in decimals is similar to the way it works in whole numbers:

463 = 256 + 128 + 64 + 8 + 4 + 2 + 1

Except for fractions and decimals, there are a lot of numbers that it is impossible to store exactly, because the denominator is not a power of 2. That's why with some calculations, you'll get the actual answer ? .000...001. It's easy to fix if you just round to several decimal places after you get the result, but unfortunately, there's no way to fix this at the source.

[Amezis 0]

Ok, thanks for your answer. But it doesn't really affect me since I am rounding the answer to closest whole number anyway, using the ceil() function.