Because you're getting the numbers as hex strings instead of ones and zeros, you'll need to do a bit of extra work.
PHP does not reliably support numbers over 32 bits as integers. 64-bit support requires being compiled and running on a 64-bit machine. This means that attempts to represent a 64-bit integer may fail depending on your environment. For this reason, it will be important to ensure that PHP only ever deals with these numbers as strings. This won't be hard, as hex strings coming out of the database will be, well, strings, not ints.
There are a few options here. The first would be using the GMP extension's gmp_xor
function, which performs a bitwise-XOR operation on two numbers. The resulting number will have bits turned on when the two numbers have opposing bits in that location, and off when the two numbers have identical bits in that location. Then it's just a matter of counting the bits to get the remaining task count.
Another option would be transforming the number-as-a-string into a string of ones and zeros, as you've represented in your question. If you have GMP, you can use gmp_init
to read it as a base-16 number, and use gmp_strval
to return it as a base-2 number.
If you don't have GMP, this function provided in another answer (scroll to "Step 2") can accurately transform a string-as-number into anything between base-2 and 36. It will be slower than using GMP.
In both of these cases, you'd end up with a string of ones and zeros and can use code like that posted by @Mark Baker to get the difference.