How can I get a hex dump of a string in PHP?

Question

I\'m investigating encodings in PHP5. Is there some way to get a raw hex dump of a string? i.e. a hex representation of each of the bytes (not characters) in a string?

Answer 1

"Functional" version:

$s = "\x04\x00\xa0\x00";
echo implode(' ', array_map(function($char) {
    # return sprintf('%02s', $char);
    return str_pad($char, 2, '0', STR_PAD_LEFT);
}, array_map('dechex', unpack('C*', $s))));

Borrowing from Ionuț G. Stan's comment, the last line might be as follows:

}, array_map('dechex', array_map('ord', str_split($s)))));