Turning a vulgar fraction into numbers in PHP

Question

How to turn a vulgar fraction into something PHP can use to compute the value of.

For example ¾

$l = \'¾\';

echo utf8_encode($l) . \' :: \' .ord($l) .          


        

Answer 1

You could use iconv() to transliterate the symbol into a form that can then be easily parsed:

function utf8FractionToFloat($symbol)
{
    $translit = trim(iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $symbol));

    if ($translit && preg_match('~^(\d+)/(\d+)$~', $translit, $match)) {
        return $match[1] / $match[2];
    }
}

var_dump(utf8FractionToFloat('½')); // float(0.5)
var_dump(utf8FractionToFloat('¾')); // float(0.75)