Comments on: Formatting bytes with significant figures in PHP

By: Jay Straw

Jay Straw — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 15:02:06 +0000

I just used your function to format network tx/rx rates in a PHP script running on my Zaurus sl-5500. It writes that and other server info to /dev/ttyS0, where my microcontroller listens and interfaces with a 16×2 character LCD screen.

THANK YOU! You could imagine attempting this gives me plenty of headaches already! Wonderful code.

By: Paul

Paul — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 20:29:04 +0000

Hi Tamlyn

One more comment based on using your excellent function. It returns a “division-by-zero” error when $value == 0 (because log (0) is mathematically undefined). To avoid the error at this mathematical discontinuity, I simply inserted this line of code at the beginning of the function:

if ($value == 0) return 0;

Thanks again for a tremendous contribution to the PHP community!

Paul

By: Paul

Paul — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 18:09:04 +0000

Thanks a lot, Tamlyn, for sharing your terrific significant figures function. It’s really an omission from PHP and should be a native PHP function. You’ve saved people like me a lot of time and brain cycles from having to try to reinvent your wheel here!

By: Jim

Jim — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 11:54:00 +0000

Cheers dude, just saved me some time.

By: Tamlyn

Tamlyn — Tue, 05 May 2009 22:07:54 +0000

Good call. Updated. Thanks!

By: m4gus

m4gus — Tue, 05 May 2009 21:38:48 +0000

Just a note… to make your sigFig function work with negative numbers you should change the $exponent variable to:
$exponent = floor(log10(abs($value))+1);
Other then that a nice solution to this problem, thanks!