Question

Is there a way to explicitly store my numbers in php as tinyint (1 byte instead of 4).

Or could i only enforce this by storing them 4 by 4 in an int? (using a few binary operations)

I generate these values by breaking a string using str_split and interpretting these bytes as ints via unpack( ‘C’ , .. ).
Currently i store these values in an array as invdividual integers but it could save alot of space if i could store them somehow as tinyints.

Answer 1

PHP has two data types that you may want to use here: integer and string.
PHP doesn’t have any other types you could choose from (float wouldn’t be a good choice for integers, the other types are not appropriate).

An int is usually 32 or 64 bits, a string is 1 byte per character.* I propose that unless you have a lot of numbers, you won’t ever see any problem with 32 bit ints. If you absolutely positively want to safe space memory** and your numbers have a maximum of 3 digits, you could handle your numbers as strings. There’s even the BCMath extension that’ll let you operate on string numbers directly without needing to cast them back and forth. It’s quite a lot of hassle for possibly very limited gain though.

Seeing that a MySQL TINYINT is usually used for boolean values though, please be aware PHP does have a boolean type…!

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* One byte per one-byte character, that is.
** Since PHP scripts are usually only very temporary, you should only have problems with peak memory usage, not storage space. Getting more RAM may be the more efficient solution than playing with types.