Handling Binary Strings

[CharlesL]

I am trying to handle binary strings in php. I get a binary output
initialization vector from mcrypt as such:

from mcrypt:
$iv = mcrypt_create_iv($iv_size, MCRYPT_RAND);

This output may have padded nulls at the end which are significant.

I would like to convert all characters including all padding nulls at
end and convert it in a string to be saved into a database in such a way
that I can reconstruct it back to binary again later.

base64_encode and decode is not doing the job. They don't seem to
preserve the original binary value after base64_decode().

Can someone suggest some other way to preserve binary data into ASCII
and back in php?

[Pedro Graca]

CharlesL wrote:

I am trying to handle binary strings in php. I get a binary output
initialization vector from mcrypt as such:

from mcrypt:
$iv = mcrypt_create_iv($iv_size, MCRYPT_RAND);

This output may have padded nulls at the end which are significant.

I would like to convert all characters including all padding nulls at
end and convert it in a string to be saved into a database in such a way
that I can reconstruct it back to binary again later.

base64_encode and decode is not doing the job. They don't seem to
preserve the original binary value after base64_decode().

What is a padded null?

Whit plain nulls, base64_encode() and base64_decode() work for me.

<?php
$data = "abcde\0"; // trailing null
$in = base64_encode($data);
$out = base64_decode($in);

echo strlen($data), " : ", strlen($out), "\n";
for ($i=0;$i<strlen($data);++$i) {
if ($data{$i} == $out{$i}) {
echo ord($data{$i}), " ok\n";
} else {
echo ord($data{$i}), ";", ord($out{$i}), " NOT ok\n";
}
}
?>

[Andy Hassall]

On Sun, 05 Nov 2006 13:45:04 -0500, CharlesL <[e-mail]:

>I am trying to handle binary strings in php. I get a binary output
initialization vector from mcrypt as such:

from mcrypt:
$iv = mcrypt_create_iv($iv_size, MCRYPT_RAND);

This output may have padded nulls at the end which are significant.

I would like to convert all characters including all padding nulls at
end and convert it in a string to be saved into a database in such a way
that I can reconstruct it back to binary again later.

base64_encode and decode is not doing the job. They don't seem to
preserve the original binary value after base64_decode().

What version are you using? I'm not seeing trimming of trailing nul bytes on
PHP 5.2.0, at least:

andyh@excession /cygdrive/c/public_html
$ cat test.php
<?php
$data = str_repeat(chr(0), 16);

var_dump(unpack('H*', $data));

print base64_encode($data) . "\n";

var_dump(unpack('H*', base64_decode(base64_encode($data))));
?>

andyh@excession /cygdrive/c/public_html
$ php test.php
array(1) {
[1]=>
string(32) "00000000000000000000000000000000"
}
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA==
array(1) {
[1]=>
string(32) "00000000000000000000000000000000"
}

(And incidentally pack/unpack may give you another option)

--
Andy Hassall :: an**@andyh.co.uk :: http://www.andyh.co.uk
http://www.andyhsoftware.co.uk/space :: disk and FTP usage analysis tool