What kind of string representation is this?

Question

I'm running the following code and I get the following output. According to the documentation it says it returns a binary string?

PHP\pack('H*', 'ab') //     "\253"
PHP\pack('H*', 'a')  //     "\240"

I can't for the life of me figure out 253 is 'ab'. 253 is 11111101 in binary which if you were to break out is

1111 and 1101 which don't map to a or b?

What does "\253" represent?

U+00AB, character «‬, decimal 171, hex 0xAB, octal \253, binary 10101011 — Mech, Oct 01 '20 at 21:00

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 01 '20 at 21:01

U+00AB, character «‬, decimal 171, hex 0xAB, octal \253, binary 10101011

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