Why is this microtime showing up weird in PHP

Question

Why is this microtime showing up weird in PHP

$start4 = microtime(true);
    // run some php code
$end4 = microtime(true);
print \"Time4: \". ($end4 - $start         


        

Answer 1

It's normal for long numbers (very small or very large) to be converted to powers of 10. The E-5 just means that the number displayed is beeing multiplied by (10/10/10/10/10) which makes it a very small number.

0.000000000000123 is much harder to read than 1.23E-13 (for example).

Nevertheless if you do want to view the number in another format:

$start = microtime(true);
$end = microtime(true);
echo "Time: ", number_format($end - $start, 50);

This will add 50 decimal houses to the number on display.

Hope it helps!