Confirmed with latest CVS. Either the documentation is wrong or the implementation. Both won't need rocket sience to fix ...

Btw, this seems to be true for all bc*() functions.

Probably the documentation isn't clear enough about the current behaviour. Andi?

- Markus

It's not a bug, but a feature (tm). BC only works with integer values, and all arguments must be integer values.
However, the documentation is not quite clear here.

Derick

That is incorrect. BC is for arbitrary percision arithmetic. Arguments should be strings not integers. Just change the precision argument in the example from 0 to 2 and you will see that it will consider the decimal places of the multiplication arguments.

The problem is that the way PHP BC module is working is that it applies the decimal places to arguments when it should only apply to the result.

bcmul('8.78','100',2) should be '878.00'

and

bcmul('8.78','100',0) should be '878' and not '800', otherwise BC PHP module is useless because you can't perform a calculation and control the decimal places of the result without affecting the operands.

It should work like sprintf("%.2f",$operand_1*$operand_2) where 2 is the number of decimal places of the output and and not of the operand values because these may have much more decimal places than the result.

Andi can you take a look? Or just close it if it's bogus.

This bug has been fixed in CVS.

In case this was a PHP problem, snapshots of the sources are packaged
every three hours; this change will be in the next snapshot. You can
grab the snapshot at http://snaps.php.net/.
 
In case this was a documentation problem, the fix will show up soon at
http://www.php.net/manual/.

In case this was a PHP.net website problem, the change will show
up on the PHP.net site and on the mirror sites in short time.
 
Thank you for the report, and for helping us make PHP better.

bcmath functions now apply scale only to result.