PHP 6 and non-unicode strings

[yawnmoth]

I have a library that does appends characters to strings (eg. $var.=
chr(45)) and then unpacks them (eg. unpack('N4'), or whatever).

Since PHP 6, however, uses unicode strings, I'm kinda worried that PHP
6 might break my program. Since I am needing to manipulate strings on
a byte level as opposed to a character level, I don't want $var[4] to
return a two byte character - I want it to return a single byte
character.

My question is... what can I do to fix this?

I'd rather not do something like ini_set because, although the
library, itself, may use byte strings, the script including the
library might not.

Any ideas?

[Sjoerd]

On 6 aug, 21:11, yawnmoth <[e-mail]:

I am needing to manipulate strings on
a byte level as opposed to a character level

My guess is that there is a native Unicode string type, for human-
readable text, and a distinct binary string type, for applications
such as yours. Presumably, fread('bla', 'rb') would return the binary
type (because of the 'b'), or you may cast it to the right type.

http://talks.php.net/show/php6-unicode-webtech2006/19
http://www.php.net/~derick/meeting-n...t-string-types