problem half-solved, however have another

hello again I have been battling this mysterious char thats showing up in the buffer when i first log onto my chat, or else try to add new things to the logon function, I am getting the code not to "fall through" to the next prompt however, using $varname = socket_recv($sock, $read, 1024, 0) this won't put anything but a number in that variable, say for example the passwd was 'test'(just for the sake of testing for now), the password would end up being not test, but maybe the number 5 I'm assuming its returning the number of digits but this is totally not what I expected, and the manual for socket_recv is um, well for a lack of better wording, its not there on the website anymore, all except the format of it, no descriptions or anything, should i be using something else instead of socket_recv()?