php: reversing mysql_real_escape_string's effects on binary

Question

I built a webpage where users can submit a PDF which is then inserted into a MySQL database in a mediumblob for retrieval later.

This all works fine, except when the PDF

Answer 1

Ólafur,

I gathered that from the php manual, and even tried the following:

$search = array( "\\0", "\\n", "\\r", "\\\\", "\\'", "\\\"", "\Z", );
$replace = array( "\x00", "\n", "\r", "\\", "'", "\"", "\x1a" );
$desiredString = str_replace( $search, $replace, $escapedString );

This seems to works fine when dealing with text, but applying it to the binary data only further degrades PDF (e.g. paragraphs go missing).