Re: [SLUG] PHP Question: strings and numbers

From: Ian C. Blenke (icblenke@nks.net)
Date: Fri Aug 26 2005 - 00:52:17 EDT


Paul M Foster wrote:

>Anyone know how to pull data out of a file and interpret it as binary in
>PHP? Specifically, I have four bytes in a file whose contents I want to
>bit-shift left by varying amounts, and then store the results as a
>number. The raw data is binary. In python, it looks like this:
>
>s0 = ord(four_byte_string[0])
>s1 = ord(four_byte_string[1])
>s2 = ord(four_byte_string[2])
>s3 = ord(four_byte_string[3])
>return (s3 << 24) | (s2 << 16) | (s1 << 8) | s0
>
>and the value returned should be a number. Anyone know how to accomplish
>a similar thing in PHP?
>
>
Depending on the binary endianness, you could always just fread() in the
4 bytes into a string and settype() it to an integer (or do a "+= 0" to
convert it).

If you read in each byte, a character at a time, you can always use
pack() to ensure the endianness.

This is the kind of thing pack() and unpack() are for (vaguely similar
to the perl equivalent functions):

    $handle = fopen("/some/path/binary_file.bin", "rb");
    $s0 = fread($handle, 1);
    $s1 = fread($handle, 1);
    $s2 = fread($handle, 1);
    $s3 = fread($handle, 1);
    $binary_string = pack ('C4', $s0, $s1, $s2, $s3);

    // This is just an example of how to use unpack()
    $value=unpack('Linteger',$binary_string);
    $integer=$value['integer'];
    $integer+=0; // $integer is now a number containing the unpacked
Long (32bit) value parsed from $binary_string

    // Alternatively, $binary_string is already a 32bit integer, just
make sure php treats it as a number. This _should_ work.
    $binary_string+=0;

    fclose($handle);

I think this is correct, but I've not written php in a while, and the
the above was pasted together off of some google searches without
testing any of it.

 - Ian C. Blenke <icblenke@nks.net>

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