Question

1. I would like to insert this type of number format in to my database.

   $value = "20.000,00";
   

   I tried with FLOAT and DOUBLE, but they can’t handle this. Only option left that I know which works is VARCHAR?

2. Although if I do this when I am working with the numbers later and tries to subtract number from each other:

   $value2 = "15.933,50";
   $calc = $value - $value2;
   

   $calc is now 4.067, it should be 4.066,50 – how can this be correct?

Answer 1

For financial numbers, you should use the DECIMAL type. It has a fixed precision and isn’t subject to the rounding problems of floating point numbers.

Never store a money number in a VARCHAR or a FLOAT.

If you want to introduce in the database your $value, you must parse it so that you can introduce the number :

$fmt = new NumberFormatter( 'da_DK', NumberFormatter::DECIMAL );
$num = $fmt->parse($value, NumberFormatter::TYPE_INT32)

To display a number you got from your DB as “20.000,00”, you may use

$display_value = $fmt->format($num);

EDIT :

If you can’t use a NumberFormatter, you may use this to build a string that you can introduce in a DECIMAL field (in a float one too but don’t) :

$v = str_replace(',', '.', str_replace('.', '', $value));

This changes "20.000,00" to "20000.00" which the database can understand.
But it’s always dangerous to ask a database to parse the strings as numbers (you may change the locale later). I’d recommend you to parse the number in PHP and to explicitly specify the locale.