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Different number notations for different numerical bases:

0144  // base 8
 100  // base 10
0x64  // base 16

To convert between number bases, use PHP base_convert() function:

$hex = 'a1'; // hexadecimal number (base 16)
$decimal = base_convert($hex, 16, 10); // $hex converted from base 16 to base 10 and $decimal is now 161

$bin = '101'; // binary number (base 2)
$decimal = base_convert($bin, 2, 10); // $bin converted from base 2 to base 10 and $decimal is now 5

base_convert() function changes a number string from the original base to the target base number string. Other than this, there are also other specialized base conversion functions in PHP that’s basically created around decimal (base 10):

// convert to base 10
print bindec(11011); // 27
print octdec(33);    // 27
print hexdec('1b');  // 27

// convert from base 10
print decbin(27);    // 11011
print decoct(27);    // 33
print dechex(27);    // 1b

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Degrees and radians are different metric means to gauge an angle. They are mutually convertible in PHP. Simply use the PHP degrees to radians function deg2rad() and PHP radians to degrees function rad2deg().

$degrees = 180;
$radians = deg2rad($degrees); // 3.1416
$degrees = rad2deg($radians); // 180

Because trigonometric calculations are usually done in radians, you have to convert the degrees into radians:

$cosine = cos(deg2rad($degrees));

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To display numbers to end users, especially large numbers, you may need to format them to be more user friendly. For example, with a large integer 43386000.75, it is usually preferred to comma-separate every 3 digits to this:

43,386,000.75

To format numbers this way in PHP, you need number_format() function:

print number_format(43386000.75); // prints '43,386,000.75'

This is English notation of numbers with thousands separator. For French number notation:

print number_format(43386000, 2, ',', ' '); // prints '43 386 000,75'

Deducing from the parameters used in the above example, we have the number_format() function synopsis:

string number_format ( float $number , int $decimals , string $dec_point , string $thousands_sep )

With number_format(), you can format any integer number of floating point number by thousands separator (which in most cases is a comma), decimal point (which usually is a period point), number of decimal digits after the decimal point.

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Some strings of texts may lack necessary wraps and don’t have natural line breaks in them so that the lines are too long to read comfortably. Therefore, you want a way to insert line breaks in to the string every dozens of characters.

The php function you need is wordwrap():

$s = ' ... '; // very long single line string text
$s_wrapped = wordwrap($s, 60); // $s is wrapped by every 60 characters and evaluated to $s_wrapped

Line breaks are inserted into the original text every 60 characters.

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