Brick\Math

Provides the BigInteger and BigDecimal classes to work with arbitrary precision numbers.

Installation

This library is installable via Composer. Just define the following requirement in your composer.json file:

{
    "require": {
        "brick/math": "*"
    }
}

Requirements

This library requires PHP 5.6, PHP 7 or HHVM.

Although the library can work seamlessly on any PHP installation, it is highly recommended that you install the GMP or BCMath extension to speed up calculations. The fastest available calculator implementation will be automatically selected at runtime.

Package contents

This library provides the following public classes:

• Brick\Math\ArithmeticException: exception thrown when an error occurs.
• Brick\Math\BigInteger: represents an arbitrary-precision integer number.
• Brick\Math\BigDecimal: represents an arbitrary-precision decimal number.
• Brick\Math\RoundingMode: holds constants for the rounding modes.

Overview

Instantiation

The constructor of BigInteger and BigDecimal is private, you must use the of() factory method to obtain an instance:

$integer = BigInteger::of('123456');
$decimal = BigDecimal::of('123.456');

The following types are accepted: integer, float, string as long as they can be safely converted to an integer in the case of BigInteger::of(), or to a decimal number in the case of BigDecimal::of().

Prefer instantiating from string or integer rather than float, as floating-point values are imprecise by design, and using them with of() defeats the purpose of using an arbitrary precision library.

Only string allows you to safely instantiate a number with an unlimited number of digits.

Immutability

The BigInteger and BigDecimal classes are immutable: their value never changes, so that they can be safely passed around. All methods that return a BigInteger or BigDecimal return a new object, leaving the original object unaffected:

$ten = BigInteger::of(10);

echo $ten->plus(5); // 15
echo $ten->multipliedBy(3); // 30

Parameter types

All methods that accept a number: plus(), minus(), multipliedBy(), etc. accept the same types as of(). As an example, given the following number:

$integer = BigInteger::of(123);

The following lines are equivalent:

$integer->multipliedBy(123);
$integer->multipliedBy('123');
$integer->multipliedBy($integer);

Chaining

All the methods that return a new number can be chained, for example:

echo BigInteger::of(10)->plus(5)->multipliedBy(3); // 45

Division & rounding modes

When dividing numbers, if the remainder of the division if not zero, the result needs to be rounded up or down. By default, the library assumes that rounding is unnecessary, and throws an exception if the remainder of the division is not zero:

BigInteger::of(7)->dividedBy(2); // throws an ArithmeticException

In that case, you need to explicitly provide a rounding mode:

echo BigInteger::of(7)->dividedBy(2, RoundingMode::DOWN); // 3
echo BigInteger::of(7)->dividedBy(2, RoundingMode::UP); // 4

When dividing a BigDecimal, you can also specify the scale of the result:

echo BigDecimal::of(3)->dividedBy(11, RoundingMode::UP, 2); // 0.28
echo BigDecimal::of(3)->dividedBy(11, RoundingMode::DOWN, 6); // 0.272727

There are a number of rounding modes you can use:

Rounding mode	Description
UNNECESSARY	Assumes that no rounding is necessary, and throws an exception if it is.
UP	Rounds away from zero.
DOWN	Rounds towards zero.
CEILING	Rounds towards positive infinity. If the result is positive, behaves as for UP; if negative, behaves as for DOWN.
FLOOR	Rounds towards negative infinity. If the result is positive, behave as for DOWN; if negative, behave as for UP.
HALF_UP	Rounds towards "nearest neighbor" unless both neighbors are equidistant, in which case round up. Behaves as for UP if the discarded fraction is >= 0.5; otherwise, behaves as for DOWN.
HALF_DOWN	Rounds towards "nearest neighbor" unless both neighbors are equidistant, in which case round down. Behaves as for UP if the discarded fraction is > 0.5; otherwise, behaves as for DOWN.
HALF_CEILING	Rounds towards "nearest neighbor" unless both neighbors are equidistant, in which case round towards positive infinity. If the result is positive, behaves as for HALF_UP; if negative, behaves as for HALF_DOWN.
HALF_FLOOR	Rounds towards "nearest neighbor" unless both neighbors are equidistant, in which case round towards negative infinity. If the result is positive, behaves as for HALF_DOWN; if negative, behaves as for HALF_UP.
HALF_EVEN	Rounds towards the "nearest neighbor" unless both neighbors are equidistant, in which case rounds towards the even neighbor. Behaves as for HALF_UP if the digit to the left of the discarded fraction is odd; behaves as for HALF_DOWN if it's even.

Serialization

BigInteger and BigDecimal can be safely serialized on a machine and unserialized on another. No context is stored in the serialized variable, only the value.