Add a way to pass binary data

[wiktor-k]

Hi!

I'd like to pass binary data between PHP and the Rust crate. As far as I understand both on PHP side this is just a string while on rust side they'd be slices of u8 (or vectors?).

Is something like that possible or planned?

Thanks again for this great library!

[davidcole1340]

Will take a look into it this weekend, seems simple enough.

[davidcole1340]

@wiktor-k Would you be able to provide an example? I'd probably like to try and provide a generic impl over a couple types so I'm thinking something similar to pack.

[wiktor-k]

Sure! I'm working with @willbrowningme on one library that uses OpenPGP keys. Currently we need to armor all keys (basically base64 encode) and that makes keys stored in db 33% bigger than necessary.

You can check out this function: https://gitlab.com/willbrowning/anonaddy-sequoia/-/blob/master/src/lib.rs#L186

It should accept and return just bytes and the calling PHP code would save and that from the database.

[davidcole1340]

I see, would something like this work?

pub extern fn test(ex: &mut ExecutionData, ret: &mut Zval) {
    let x: Vec<u8> = vec![1, 2, 3, 4, 5];
    ret.set_string(String::from_utf8_lossy(x));
}

and then in PHP

$x = unpack('C*, test());

Not sure if this would work in your situation but seemed to work for me when testing. I will keep looking into a generic impl for other integer types as well, because I don't think the same would work for types like i16, i32 etc.

[wiktor-k]

from_utf8_lossy will replace invalid chars with replacement character so it may break the underlying data if it's not UTF8 https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/string/struct.String.html#method.from_utf8_lossy

I need to check the actual example that you have. Thanks for help!

[davidcole1340]

Could you have a look at #32 and tell me what you think? Seems to work for most types that pack works with. Here's a quick example:

/// Unpacks a binary u8 array
pub extern fn skel_unpack(ex: &mut ExecutionData, ret: &mut Zval) {
    let mut packed = Arg::new("packed", DataType::String);
    parse_args!(ex, packed);
    let value = unsafe { packed.zval().unwrap().binary::<u8>(); };
    dbg!(value);
}

/// Packs a binary u8 array
pub extern fn skel_pack(ex: &mut ExecutionData, ret: &mut Zval) {
    ret.set_binary(vec![12u8, 13, 14, 15, 20, 25]);
}

$x = [15, 30, 45];
skel_unpack(pack('C*', ...$x));
// [15, 30, 45] from Rust

$x = unpack('C*', skel_pack());
var_dump($x); // array(6) [12, 13, 14, 15, 20, 25]

[wiktor-k]

David, sorry for the super late reply but I did write a small proof-of-concept code using set_binary and it works very much fine: https://gitlab.com/willbrowning/anonaddy-sequoia/-/merge_requests/7/diffs I did file_put_contents the binary and it saved all bytes just fine. So 👍 from me!

Thanks for your time and hard work on this lib! I really appreciate it.

[davidcole1340]

No worries, thanks for confirming it works. I'll merge it into master now.