ord() on binary strings

It makes perfect sense to me that ord() would work on binary strings.
When we return an ASCII value we don't limit the range returned, it can
be 1 or 255. So, I see no reason to cripple this function and prevent it
from working on binary data.

Indeed, the only thing is that you can't really talk about "ASCII"
values, as binary data doesn't really have an encoding (and certainly
not ascii as that's 7bits only). But IMO that's something to tune in the
docs.

Derick

--
Derick Rethans
http://derickrethans.nl | http://ez.no | http://xdebug.org

Did Andrei have a reason besides the docs? Even without IS_UNICODE/IS_BINARY
it sounds like the docs could use tuning anyway, no?

Andrei: The docs say "Return ASCII value of character", which doesn't
make sense for binary. You can use bin2hex(), bin2hex() == ord()
for binary.

(Which is not true, as it doesn't return the ordinal value, just a two
digit hex string)

Derick: anyway, ord() always worked on string like this, seems
strange to break it (and yes, it already did)
Andrei: you had binary strings before?
Derick: normal strings of course, but it came from a file, so it turned
binary and ord() started failing

Andrei: Then you should fix your code and convert that binary to
something sensible if you are reading text
Derick: it's not text, it's binary
Andrei: if it's binary, why do you need to know the ascii value
Derick: Because I'm converting a binary file to a C file (for the
timezone database)

Then he continues saying that it's Ok to break BC in unicode mode.

regards,
Derick

--
Derick Rethans
http://derickrethans.nl | http://ez.no | http://xdebug.org