Oracle, Stored Procedure Out Variable confusion

confusion: Using PHP 4.0.3pl1 with oci8 libraries and Oracle 8.1.6 there seems to be problem when retrieving OUT-Variables from stored procedure, bind to a variable. for example i got an error retrun value (parsed to SQL as :1 and bind to $error with a buffer of 4) it could !! happen that $error looks like 0 [zero] but is not a [zero] but something else sometime $error == 0 is true, sometimes it false ... WOrkaraund: using it as a string helped "$error" == "0" is always true when $error looks like a zero. there is no sign of some extra spaces or invisible chars. strlen is always 1 and print always prints 0. But sometimes zero isn#t less enough ... ;-) Did someone else face this problem or do you know if this is fixed in later releases or if this a special NET8 remote DB on linux and client on solaris problem ? mk