note 992 deleted from function.fputs by googleguy

Note Submitter: adam at nedstat dot nl ---- A note about including length: if you are writing binary data you should *always* specify the data's length. The reason is that the operating system has a special character to denote end of *strings*, but not for binary data. Binary data can be anything, so you can't very well reserve an end-of-data character. So the reason why writing binary data without specifying it's length can truncate it is that the only thing the system has to go on (without writing the entire contents of memory starting at the variable's address) is the end-of-string character, which could very well appear randomly in the middle of your set of binary data. The reason that length() could have worked on the variable is that it is implemented in C as sizeof(), which actually fetches the size of the memory chunk associated with the variable, but this is not advisable because sizeof() can also return the size of the *pointer* to the variable if you're not careful (ie, passing it by reference into a second function). In C it's best to keep track of size of the data you are accumulating as you accumlate it, so probably in PHP, too.