… save the day. The trick is that PHP floats are in fact doubles, i.e. double-precision 64-bit numbers. They have 52 bits… “precision” option set from php.ini which affects the conversion. I’ve played with it a bit; the compiled-in and php.ini-dist values seem to vary across architectures and versions, but setting precision=16 (enough to hold…

… excerpt Sometimes you need to work with big numbers in PHP (gulp). For example, sometimes 32-bit identifiers are not enough… written about the mess that 64-bit integers are in PHP. But if the numbers you use do not cover 64… fully, floats might save the day. The trick is that PHP floats are in fact doubles, i.e. double-precision 64-bit numbers. They [...]

… its precision No, it’s not. It must not lose precision in THIS case. Refer to IEEE 754 section on 64-bit doubles (it’s a bit more trusted source than php… able to manipulate 52-bit integer values stored as doubles without any precision loss. That actually works, and might be a perfectly…