Null character as field seperator in a string.

For historic reasons, I have a file that contains a number of records in which the fields are seperated by the NULL character, i.e, field1\0field2\0field3\0field4 I need to parse out the fields from this string. The string is read into the program using $buffer = fgets(...). This would be no problem in Perl or C but I cannot get this to work in PHP. I have tried using preg_split("/\0/", $buffer); But this fails. I've tried walking through the string but it seems that $buffer only has the content up to the first NULL character. Does anyone have a simple solution to this problem. Regards Dave