What are the potential benefits and drawbacks of storing user rights as binary values in a PHP application?

Storing user rights as binary values in a PHP application can be beneficial for efficient storage and comparison operations. However, it can also make it difficult to manage and understand user permissions, especially as the number of permissions grows. It may also require additional logic to handle bitwise operations for checking and setting permissions. 

// Example of storing user rights as binary values in PHP
$permissions = [
    'read' => 1, // 0001
    'write' => 2, // 0010
    'delete' => 4, // 0100
    'admin' => 8 // 1000
];

$userPermissions = $permissions['read'] | $permissions['write']; // User has read and write permissions

if ($userPermissions & $permissions['write']) {
    echo "User has write permission";
}

Keywords

binary values user rights PHP application benefits drawbacks

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