Question

example:

the following is correct?

$var = floatval($arr[2]) ;

“You cannot use floatval() on arrays…” maybe that’s an old directive or how to edit…?

Answer 1

That quote from the manual (which BTW doesn’t seem to exist in the current manual anymore) only means that you can’t use floatval on values that are arrays, i.e.:

$foo = array();
$bar = floatval($foo);

Which, BTW, is not entirely correct, since it would produce either 1.0 or 0.0, depending on whether the array was empty or not.* It just doesn’t make much sense. If you access a scalar value inside an array, that’s not using “floatval on an array”. I.e., this works perfectly fine:

$foo = array("42.1231");
$bar = floatval($foo[0]);

That’s using the scalar value in $foo[0], whether that’s in an array or not is irrelevant.

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* The manual now clearly says Empty arrays return 0, non-empty arrays return 1. Maybe this behavior has changed?