Matching, with some binary?

[FVxSF]

I'm working on a php interface to get some game server information. So far everything is looking really good, but there are some quirks I'm trying to fix.

 

Let's say I want to get the players from the server. I've been using substr and strpos to get the section I need

 

<?php
$PlayerNamesRaw = substr($PlayerDCopy, strpos($PlayerDCopy, "player_"), (strpos($PlayerDCopy, "score_") - strpos($PlayerDCopy, "player_")));
?>

 

This seems to work well and fast but ever one in a while I get 2 "player_" but the second "player_" is wedged in the name of a player. Look below:

 

player_�� TheGeaRGrindeR�.iNs. Zeropa�T.M.D kaaskop�=LTL= murasaki_imo� Lanimret� SpongeBucket�=HHaz= o-King� s�player_� sgtsrt�

 

You can see it starts off player_ followed by 2 bytes. But towards the end (this is take from a longer name list) you see player_ again. But what I have noticed is that when part of the name is cut you can see the full name after player. But here's my little problem. After I remove player_ and the extra bytes and convery chr(0) to a comma I'm still stuck with that partial name. I can ususally come up with an expression to solve this.. but since I'm working with non-standard characters (those maily being chr(0)), how can I do a preg_replace and replace the data between chr(0) and player_?

 

Going back to the provided string, how can I remove the S between o-King chr(0) AND char(0)player_

 

o-King chr(0) <-- REMOVE ME BETWEEN --> char(0)player_

 

I hope this makes since.

[effigy]

What is the exact format of this data (try a hex dump)? What are the black question marks--nulls?