Can't convert 'binary' string to 'regular' string

Question

I\'m reading from a file through \'file_get_contents\'. After exploding the content, one of the elements is presented this way when I dump it:

dd($myVariable);
<         


        

Answer 1

You would need to unpack the binary data into a readable string using the unpack function (http://php.net/manual/en/function.unpack.php)

Example for a string:

$var = b"binary";
$unpacked = unpack("a*", $var); // "a*" stands for as much as NUL-padded strings as possible
var_dump($unpacked);