Reading binary file in php and converting it into string

Question

I spent almost a day for this , but did not get success.

What i want to do is, i have a binary file "data.dat"

I want to read the file contents and output it in text format in say "data.txt" in php.

I tried unpack function of php, but requires the type to be mentioned as the first argument(May be i am wrong, new to php).

$data = fread($file, 4); // 4 is the byte size of a whole on a 32-bit PC.     
$content= unpack("C", $data);    //C for unsigned charecter , i for int and so on...

But what if i dont know that at what place , what type of data is stored in the file that i am reading?

This function is restricting me because of the type.

I want something similar to this

$content= unpack("s", $data);   //where s can denote to string

Thanks.

Answer 1

PHP does not have a "binary" type. Binary data is stored in strings. If you read binary data from a file, it's already stored as a string. You do not need to convert it into a string.

If the binary data already represents text in some standard encoding, you don't need to do anything as you already have a valid string. If the binary data represents some encoding, you need to know what you need to do with it, we don't know.