$TBA Getting Translated to $0 (Custom Fields)

Question

I'm working on a products showcase website, and in my index I have this snippet of code for my two variables ($price for the price, $buynow for the URL)

<div class="buyitnow">
<?php global $post; $price = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'price', true);
$buylink = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'buynow', true);
if ( $price ) { ?>$<?php echo ( number_format($price, 2, ".", "") * 100 / 100 ); 
Echo "(<a href=$buylink>Buy</a>)" ?>
<?php } else {} ?></div>

This works perfectly. For a non-product post, when no price is filled, nothing is displayed.

However, there are products that the price of is TBA (To Be Announced). I suspect because I'm using number_format when I enter TBA as the value of price it automatically outputs $0.

How can this be fixed while taking into account that I do need to use number_format so I can sort products by price later on.

Please note that I'm just starting to get my hands dirty with code so any further elaboration will be much appreciated!

Answer 1

The problem is that you're trying to perform a math operation on a string ('TBA') so the result is going to be 0. Try testing if the value is numeric by using the php function is_numeric(). You can see the docs for that function here.

So in your code do this:

if (is_numeric($price)) {

    ...format the number

} else {

   echo 'TBA';

}