mb_string overloading and binary data...

Hi: This is kind of a user-space question, but I'm hoping that it concerns enough of the PHP infrastructure (conceptually) that this is the right place to post it. I've got an application that processes both textual and binary data. The domain of the application isn't really relevant, but it makes liberal use of string and pcre function. Ignoring the fact (?) that php_pcre doesn't seem to be mb-aware... Say I were to turn on the mb_string overload support, effectively replacing strlen, etc. with equivalent multibyte functions. Is there any way then to still get the exact size, in bytes, of a 'string' of binary data? In general, I guess the question is 'Is there a preferred way of handling binary data in memory, while remaining multibyte-safe?' Apologies if this is way O/T or has already been beaten to death... - Dave dave@codewhore.org