correctly reading binary data from http post

Hi. I need to send large binary data over http post (so that urlencoding or base64 encoding is not an option). I use request like this: http://people.ksp.sk/~mmx/request (there is a zero byte between A and B). There are 3 bytes of data, but when I do <?php echo strlen($HTTP_POST_VARS['DATA']); ?> it yields 1 (it truncates the string after the first zero byte). Is there a way to access all of the binary post data correctly? Thanks in advance for any advice. -- Marek 'MMx' Ludha