In what scenarios is it beneficial to work with individual bits in PHP, and what are some practical applications of this approach?

Working with individual bits in PHP can be beneficial when dealing with binary data manipulation or bitwise operations. This approach allows for more efficient memory usage and can be useful in scenarios where you need to perform operations at the bit level, such as setting or clearing specific bits in a binary number.

// Set the 3rd bit of a binary number to 1
$number = 0b1010;
$mask = 0b100;
$number |= $mask;
echo decbin($number); // Output: 1110