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I'm writing a client for a binary socket protocol in PHP, and it's a pain. I'm currently using pack to convert numbers into binary strings, but it's lacking. Two options pack has are:

  • Write a signed 32 bit integer in machine byte order
  • Write an insigned 32 bit integer in big endian byte order

But I need to write signed 32 bit integers in big endian order, as with Java's DataOutputStream.writeInteger. pack doesn't have that option.

Is there a way to do this with pack, or to transform the output of pack, or maybe a better library for working with binary data in PHP?

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Do you use the Zend Framework? If so, you can use the function Zend_Io_Writer::writeInt32BE()

Writes signed 32-bit integer as big-endian ordered binary data to the stream.

Or else you should take a look at the ZF-source how these guys handle this.

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The specification for PHP's pack() says that the unsigned/signed distinction only matters for unpack(), not pack().

So just use the 32 bit network byte order option (N).

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+ 4 billion, doesn't that result in the same number? I also suspect this isn't very portable, see stackoverflow.com/questions/300840/force-php-integer-overflow
@Bart vna Heukelom: On further reflection, and checking the documentation, you can just use the unsigned option.

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