Posted by Toby A Inkster on 04/30/07 10:49

brainflakes.org wrote:

> Are there actually any proper binary extensions or is using gd lib the
> way to go (as I guess it's just dealing with binary data as a 2d array
> anyway)

Assuming that each "row" of data is of the same length, and each "column"
has the same height (which I think is a fairly safe assumption if you're
modelling the data as a rectangular image) then, why not just store the
data as a string. That is, instead of storing a 3x3 array of data as this:

$array = array(
array(0x61, 0x62, 0x63),
array(0x31, 0x32, 0x33),
array(0x78, 0x79, 0x7A)
);

you store it as:

$string = 'abc123xyz';

Which is roughly how a 2-dimensional array is internally stored by a C
program.

Instead of this:

$cell = $array[$x][$y];

You use:

define(ROW_LENGTH, 3);
$cell = $string[(ROW_LENGTH*$x) + $y];

And instead of this:

$array[$x][$y] = 0x64;

this:

$string[(ROW_LENGTH*$x) + $y] = chr(0x64);


--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
http://tobyinkster.co.uk/
Geek of ~ HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python*/Apache/Linux

* = I'm getting there!

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