php programing problem: formating decimal?

Question

how do I format a decimal number to ".000" without the leading 0 in front of the decimal point.

Answer 1

$number = 0.98;
$formatted_number = number_format ($number, 3);
if (abs($number) < 1) {
$formatted_number = str_replace('0.', '.', $formatted_number);
}

This should set $formatted_number to ".980"...

Answer 2

use format_number to get the decimal place. den convert the decimal to string and substring it