setlocale to fr-FR in PHP and number formatting

Question

I am trying to create a French version of one of my sites. I have set setlocale(LC_ALL, 'fr_FR'); at the top of my page, and using strftime I am displaying dates correctly in the French style.

However I am having some problems with a number. Part of the page uses data I am getting from a Web Service. I am assigning a returned value to a var like this:

$overallRating = $returnArray['Overall'];

I am then using the following code later to format it to 1 decimal place

number_format($overallRating,1)

In the English version the overallRating value might be 7.5 and returns a value such as 7.5 (the reason for running it through the number_format is if it returns 7 I want it to display 7.0)

However in the French version if I print out the raw $overallRating value I get 7,5 which looks like it has translated it into french. This would be fine but if I run it through number_format I get the error:

Notice: A non well formed numeric value encountered in /sites/index.php  on line 250

Line 250 is the number_format line

I presume the translation to 7,5 is messing it up, but not sure how to solve this...

Using PHP 5.3 in case there is anything new that helps me

Answer 1

So eventually found the answer after a lot of research.

PHP only really works with standard US decimal seperators and can't cope with the french , seperator.

The answer, although not perfect is to reset numeric values to use US while allowing dates etc to be formatted in French. Placing this line:

 setlocale(LC_NUMERIC, 'C');

Under

 setlocale(LC_ALL, 'fr_FR'); 

has done the trick

Answer 2

is this what you are asking ?

<?php
    $overallRating = number_format($number, 1, '.', '');
?>

Later Edit:

<?php
setlocale(LC_ALL, 'fr_FR');
$number = '7';
echo $overallRating = number_format($number, 1, '.', '');
?>

Answer 3

I wanted to take a French-edited string like "54,33" and save it back to the db as en_US number because, as has been pointed out, PHP really only likes numbers in the en_US format. I didn't see any built-in PHP conversion functions so built this to do the job. Removes the thousands separator and replaces the decimal separator with "." and it's designed to work with any setup.

//Currency Conversion Back to US for DB Storage or PHP number formatting
function number_convert_us($num) {
    $locale_settings = localeconv();
    $num = str_replace($locale_settings['mon_thousands_sep'], "", trim($num));
    $num = str_replace($locale_settings['mon_decimal_point'], ".", $num);
    return number_format((double)$num, 2, '.', '');
}

I'll build a similar thing for JavaScript. Found this library for display: http://software.dzhuvinov.com/jsworld-currency-formatting.html