PHP 4.0 Bug #5444: Long VARCHARs create invalid strings

From: schmidt@bcc.de Operating system: linux 2.2 / glibc 2.1.3 PHP version: 4.0.1pl2 PHP Bug Type: Oracle related Bug description: Long VARCHARs create invalid strings Any select command on VARCHARS (256+) does not return a "regular" string, but (following a tcpdump) contains 0<CHAR>0<CHAR>0<CHAR>... This causes a non-display with Netscape (not even visible in page source) 4.7x on Linux & Win (at least). Lynx and MSIE (at least) do work. I consider this a bug, as with PHP 3 the output was valid (and visible with Netscape). I'm using Oracle 8.0.5.0.0 Linux - my PHP configuration command was --without-pgsql --without-mysql --with-oci8 --with-zlib --sysconfdir=/etc --without-gd --with-apxs The webserver is not the same as the db machine, if this matters. The table is like create table tab (col1 varchar(256), col2 varchar(256), col3 varchar(256)) and the code used to print looks like function _db_nextresult($result) { if (OCIFetchInto($result, $fetcharray, OCI_ASSOC)) { return $fetcharray; } else { return false; } } for ($result_b = _db_nextresult ($result), $i=0; $result_b; $i++) { while (list ($key, $val) = each ($result_b) ) { echo "$key - $val<BR>"; } $result_b = _db_nextresult ($result); } Note that with printf ("%s - %s<BR>\n", $key, $val); you wan't see a single thing, not even with lynx or MSIE, as IMHO the zero in the string terminates it before the first character is printed. It also becomes quite difficult to parse the string and replace the zeroes.... If you want to take a look at it, feel free to visit http://something.bcc.de/test.php for a php test and http://something.bcc.de/t2.php for the problem...