php functions binary safe?

Question

Possible Duplicate:
In PHP what does it mean by a function being binary-safe ?

What exacly does it mean a function (example: dirname) is binary safe?

score 8 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 17 '11 at 01:02

It means two things. First the function works on strings that contain \0 the NUL byte. This is not a given, because functions are often implemented in C which would treat that as string terminator. PHP however uses length-denominated strings.

Second, in some contexts it means that a particular string function ignores the character set and does not try to interpret UTF-8 sequences. For raw binary data the UTF-8 sequencing would be wrong, thus making functions fail if they try to treat it as text.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 17 '11 at 01:01

0

It means that the data will not be interpreted as text.

answered Feb 17 '11 at 01:01

Payson Welch

1,388
2
17
29

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 17 '11 at 01:01

It means that binary data can pass through the function, and it won't be treated as text. Sometimes if you have string functions and you try to use them for raw binary data (such as a string replace function in other languages), they will garble your data.

Perhaps a better description at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary-safe

php functions binary safe?

3 Answers3