I have some data that won’t printf….
echo works, but not printf
There is data in the string, also simplexml_load_string won’t parse the string.
There is some binary or invisible character that I cannot see and can’t get the ordinal value for that is causing printf to fail as well as most other string functions in PHP.
Clearly this is an encoding issue, however, I don’t know how to find out what it is so I can properly encode/decode it.
$string = getStringFromDatabase();
printf($string);
…
Nothing is displayed
…
No errors, No Warnings, No Nothing
Clearly there is data there, I know it’s there if I loop over every single character, however, I don’t where to go from there.
[UPDATE]
This is weird because the ordinal value is outside of the typical ASCII range.
ord($buffer[$i]) = 1610
it is a combo of a DLE and LF characters. Not sure how it got there or why. Or what it was supposed to be, the data on either side is valid and the location for this is quite odd.
think <offending char here>0,000
The answer is a multi-byte character that is an bug from the runtime. You can work around it by finding chr(16) in your string and replacing it with an empty string (""). That is if you need it to work with s/v/printf functions.