accesing string bytes

[dodo]

Hello,

I want to write some character encoding conversion function, and I ran into
a problem: when I try to white characters in a string, I'm only able to
write the string in 16bit steps. Here is some code to illustrate the
problem:
$string = "";
$string .= chr(5);
$string .= chr(6);

the result will be a string containing these bytes: 05 00 06 00.
I want to access the string in an 8 bit scope, so that the result will be 05
06.
If I enter data into the string using the [] operator, I have exactly the
same problem.

I'm using PHP 4.4.3RC2-dev

Thanks in advance,

Oded.

[zq29]

I'm not 100% sure on this, but I do have some thoughts:

1) If you have [url=http://uk2.php.net/manual/en/ref.mbstring.php]mbstring[/url] running with PHP, can you force it to 8-bit mode?
2) Would the [url=http://uk2.php.net/manual/en/language.operators.bitwise.php]Bitwise Operators[/url] be of any use you you here?