WooCommerce : How to convert wp_price value to a numeric value?

I’m developing a table with two columns, "State" and "Sales". To get the number in the sales column, I use the wc_price function, which works just fine to output a currency string:

CA $1,652.13

CO $515.80

…etc.

I have at least 50 rows, one for each state.

The very last row will output the total of all the dollar amounts from column 2.

I discovered that the actual result from wc_price isn’t just a sting, it’s a block of html:

<bdi>
    <span class="woocommerce-Price-currencySymbol">$</span>
    435.50
</bdi>

I tried to get to the actual number within the html, 435.50 using strip_tags:

$numeric = strip_tags(wc_price($total)); // result is a simple string, with the $ sign
echo str_replace("$","",$numeric) . "<br>"; // doesn't strip away the $ sign.
$tally = $tally + $numeric; // produces an error, non-numeric value.

The error is on the $tally = line. This doesn’t work in any way. Sure, the html tags are stripped, and I’m left with a string: $435.50. In other words, I can’t get rid of that danged ‘$’ for some reason. I simply cannot parse, convert, or anything to that currency string. (int), intval($numeric), (float)$numeric, floatval($numeric), etc., none of these work. number_format doesn’t work, either.

Warning: A non-numeric value encountered in C:xampphtdocsmysitewp-contentpluginsmy-custom-pluginmy-custom-plugin.php on line 104