Re: How to make binary strings useful?

I've written complete file parsers in PHP, and the only snag I've run into is dealing Signed integers (and larger). Jerry Miller wrote:

Is there an example of the UNIX od utility written in PHP? Is such a useful task even possible??

From what I've seen of strings, they're completely

opaque, so what good does it do to be able to read binary-safe strings from a file???

the pack() and unpack() functions are used to remove data from and place data into binary strings.

Even the deprecated (why????) $str{$inx} notation apparently results in another string, because trying to printf it with the "%02x" format always comes out with "00." (Maybe that's why -- it's useless!) $str{$inx} does return a single character string, in order to get the numerical value, try using ord()

As an experienced C programmer, I'm finding PHP to be as counter-intuitive for low-level work as Perl is. I need to convert binary dumps of data structures into database table rows, and MySQL on my server doesn't support queries from C. I thought about writing a CGI script (in C) that would generate the hard-coded PHP output for each instance, but a URL that ends in ".cgi" is never intercepted by the PHP interpreter. Worse yet, the <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="" SRC=""> that works perfectly well with JavaScript is likewise ignored if the language is PHP! Finally, I'm not aware of a Content-type such as "text/php." What exactly was the purpose of designing yet another inflexible language?!

Chris http://www.php.net/pack http://www.php.net/unpack http://www.php.net/ord http://www.php.net/chr