smert.net

Yesterday I finished up a project I was working on that I wrote in PHP. I created it on a Linux machine and I needed to test it on Windows. On the Windows system I tested it using the latest version of WAMP. I had it all setup ready to go when I got a nasty error message Fatal error: Call to undefined function money_format(). I thought it was rather strange but I figured that I didn’t have the correct PHP extension enabled. After looking for such a extension, I started to think about it more and realized that it wasn’t apart of an extension. I took a look at the manual for money_format and found that the function doesn’t exist on Windows.

Note: The function money_format() is only defined if the system has strfmon capabilities. For example, Windows does not, so money_format() is undefined in Windows.

Since I was in a rush to get it up and running I copied this function for the time being. I started digging around for alternatives since I didn’t want to include that function in the beginning of my code. I wanted a solution that would work on both systems without any special work a rounds. The functions you need to use are number_format combined with localeconv. Here is an example.

<?php
setlocale(LC_ALL, ''); // Locale will be different on each system.
$amount = 1000000.97;
$locale = localeconv();
echo $locale['currency_symbol'], number_format($amount, 2, $locale['decimal_point'], $locale['thousands_sep']);
?>

With this you can write code that is actually portable instead of relying on operating system features. Having the money_format function available in PHP without it being an extension is pretty stupid. I don’t see why you would want to create inconsistencies like this between different operating systems in a programming language. Especially since this seems to be apart of the standard base of functions included with PHP. Maybe PHP is as bad as they say it is.

Update (23MAY08)

I thought I would mix it up by creating several tiny articles instead of one large article today.