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.

Well, what is stored in the .dat file? If you don't know, we don't know. If it's just text to begin with, you don't need to do anything at all. — deceze
– deceze ♦, Commented Jun 24, 2012 at 7:18
You could try using fileinfo to identify the file type, but if that doesn't work you're SOL. You can't convert from something if you don't know what you're converting from. PHP isn't magic. — GordonM
– GordonM, Commented Jun 24, 2012 at 7:22
Ohhh, i mean i know that the file contains binary data @deceze and GordonM, sorry if you get it different. I wish a complete conversion of that files data to human readable text. — Akash Saikia
– Akash Saikia, Commented Jun 24, 2012 at 11:25

deceze · Accepted Answer · 2012-06-24 07:25:19Z

3

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.

answered Jun 24, 2012 at 7:25

deceze♦

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3 Comments

Akash Saikia Over a year ago

Seems i myself not clear with the question. But the file is .Dat, it has binary data, that is not human readable . My php program opens the file stream with $handle = fopen("filename","rb"); . And now if i read the file, i get the filecontents in string, but remember this string is a simple text that is not human readable, its just the encoded data and seems like '@#' and some garbled charecters. I want this to be saved as human readable text, where that garbled character for example meant for text "America" and not as "@#".

deceze Over a year ago

Then you need to know what kind of encoding it is. Just "binary .dat" doesn't mean anything. Everything is binary in a computer. If you don't know what that binary format represents and how to get readable text out of it, we don't know either.

Akash Saikia Over a year ago

yeah, its ASCII encoding, and i accept the thing that everything is binary in computer @deceze, just confused with this problem.

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