Convert a string to a double – is this possible?

Just use floatval().

E.g.:

$var="122.34343";
$float_value_of_var = floatval($var);
echo $float_value_of_var; // 122.34343

And in case you wonder doubleval() is just an alias for floatval().

And as the other say, in a financial application, float values are critical as these are not precise enough. E.g. adding two floats could result in something like 12.30000000001 and this error could propagate.