Question

I am trying to port a piece of code from Python to PHP. I’ve come across a line that I don’t understand the notation for.

secLat = 1./cos(lat)

What does the ./ operator do in this context?

Answer 1

They are just using a decimal followed by a divide sign to make sure the result is a float instead of an int. This avoids problems like the following:

>>> 1/3
0
>>> 1./3
0.3333333333333333