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Subject: PHP6 artifact - binary strings
From: dev@mabe.berlin (Marc Bennewitz)

Hi all,

Since PHP-5.2.1 we have an artifact of PHP-6 in the engine means we can 
define binary strings but such definitions haven't any effect.

So what we can define is the following:

$str = "str";
$bin = b"b\0i\0n";
$str2bin = (binary)$str;

One of the biggest issue is that currently ALL strings will be handled 
as ASCII-7 compatible strings on type-juggling but they aren't.

It would be very appreciated if PHP could respect such binary declaration:

* use binary string comparison on compare a binary string to any other 
string
* don't convert binary strings into integers on array keys
* allow bitwise operators on binary strings without casting to integer

I don't wont to open such unicode nightmare as it was planned for PHP-6!
In my opinion the above operator changes are enough and therefore 
internal functions doesn't need to be changed in the first place. The 
only changes *could* be done to functions reading/parsing data to be 
auto marked binary like: unpack, stream reading functions opened with 
fopen + "b" ...

I don't have enough zend experience and therefore I would like to know 
how complicated it would be.

Thoughts?

Marc