Why var_dump does not show null bytes?

Question

I had 2 cases where null bytes \0 are being appended to my data.

1.Casting object to an array

class myClass {
    private $var;
    function __construct() {}   
}
$myObject = (array) new myClass();
var_dump(array_map("addslashes", array_keys($myObject)));

Outputs:

array(1) { [0]=> string(14) "\0myClass\0var" }

2.When decrypting encrypted data:

function encrypt_data($data) {
    return base64_encode(mcrypt_encrypt(MCRYPT_BLOWFISH , SALT , $data , MCRYPT_MODE_ECB));
}

function decrypt_data($data) {
    $data = base64_decode($data);
    return mcrypt_decrypt(MCRYPT_BLOWFISH , SALT , $data , MCRYPT_MODE_ECB);
}

$data = '12345678901234567 aasdasd';
$edata = encrypt_data($data);
var_dump(addslashes(decrypt_data($edata)));

Outputs:

string(39) "12345678901234567 aasdasd\0\0\0\0\0\0\0"

But I would never notice \0s if not addslashes function. Why just var_dump() does not show those ? var_dump("Hello\0 World"); for example outputs 'Hello World'. In my opinion bad representation of data. And as far as I know \0 byte is end of char array (string in PHP) in C and PHP is implemented in C.

Why var_dump does not show null bytes?

1 Answers