Laravel int to 32-bit binary (and vice versa)

Question

In an attempt to create a column with 32-bit binary numbers

/**
 * Run the migrations.
 *
 * @return void
 */
public function up()
{
    Schema::create('test_binary', function (Blueprint $table) {
        $table->increments('id');
        $table->char('binary_number', 32)->charset('binary'); // From: https://stackoverflow.com/a/62615777/5675325
        $table->timestamps();

    });
}

namely

$table->char('binary_number', 32)->charset('binary');

When I view it through HeidiSQL I can see that it is of type BINARY with size 32.

When creating the seeder to populate with the desired data, I tried

/**
 * Run the database seeds.
 *
 * @return void
 */
public function run()
{
   DB::table('test_binary')->insert([
    'id' => 1,
    'binary_number' => 2,
    'created_at' => now(),
    'updated_at' => now()
    ]);

It turns out that if I use 2 or 101 in binary_number, I will get the result in DB to be 2 or 101, respectively.

When I try 000000000000000000000000000000000010 (which equals 2 in 32-bit binary) and 000000000000000000000000000001100101 (which equals 101 in 32-bit binary)

'binary_number' => 00000000000000000000000000000010,

then I get the values 8 and 294977, respectively.

However, what I am looking for is for the 2 to be stored as 0000000000000000000000000000000000000010 and the 101 to be 000000000000000000000000000001100101.

Answer 1

what you are seeing is the number being encoded in base 8, this is because you are prefixing it with a 0 (followed by more 0s) which makes 010 base 8 == 8 base 10.

In PHP to indicate that a number is binary use 0b10 so your code would be:

'binary_number' => 0b00000000000000000000000000000010, // this is 2 in decimal

If you want the decimal number 10 to be stored in the database just use:

'binary_number' => 10,

Note that it appears that the translation to binary is happening on the database end so you don't actually need to pass the binary number if you don't want to.

If you want to force the number into a binary string of the given length you can use

$binaryString = str_pad(base_convert(2, 10, 2),32,'0',STR_PAD_LEFT);  // '00000000000000000000000000000010'

More details at https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.integer.php