Recommended way for passing binary data

[cquintana92]

Hi!
First of all, thanks for developing this crate, it works wonderfully :)

However, there is a scenario that I'd like to use this crate that I don't fully understand how to do it. I'd like to pass a binary data string to Rust code, and despite having a look at #31 I don't fully understand how to use this.

I have the following code

fn do_something(input: &[u8]) -> u64 {
  // Do stuff
}

/// Computes some things
///
/// @param $input string Your input.
///
/// @return int Your result
#[php_function]
pub fn computation_rs(input: &str) -> u64 {
    do_something(input.as_bytes())
}

// Required to register the extension with PHP.
#[php_module]
pub fn module(module: ModuleBuilder) -> ModuleBuilder {
    module
}

And my PHP code looks like

$data = random_bytes(32);
$result = computation_rs($data);
echo $result;

If I replace $data with a valid string, this works, but I haven't managed to pass an array of bytes. I've tried setting the input type in rust to Vec<u8> but it didn't work either 🤔

Do you have any pointers?

Thanks!

[davidcole1340]

You can use Binary<u8> as an argument for binary data. Internally it is represented (and dereferences to) a Vec<u8>. See here for more: https://davidcole1340.github.io/ext-php-rs/types/binary.html

[cquintana92]

First of all, thanks for your fast response! I have checked and indeed it works as expected 👍

Last question regarding to this issue. I've been reading through the code for Binary<T>, and it seems like it copies all the PHP memory into Rust owned memory: https://github.com/davidcole1340/ext-php-rs/blob/master/src/binary.rs#L156-L166

Would there be a way to obtain a reference to that memory without copying it? We should be able to achieve something like that by using std::slice::from_raw_parts, which converts a *const T and a length to an &[T] (it probably would only make sense to use it for &[u8].

Probably it would make sense to implement it in another trait/struct, such as BinaryRef.

Thanks!

[cquintana92]

Implemented in this PR :)

#139