What potential pitfalls should be considered when handling binary data in PHP?

When handling binary data in PHP, potential pitfalls to consider include issues with encoding, data corruption, and memory consumption. To avoid these pitfalls, it is important to use the appropriate functions for reading and writing binary data, handle encoding and decoding properly, and be mindful of memory usage when working with large binary files.

// Example of reading binary data from a file using fread function
$filename = 'binary_data.bin';
$handle = fopen($filename, 'rb');
$binaryData = fread($handle, filesize($filename));
fclose($handle);

// Example of writing binary data to a file using fwrite function
$binaryData = "\x00\x01\x02\x03"; // example binary data
$filename = 'output.bin';
$handle = fopen($filename, 'wb');
fwrite($handle, $binaryData);
fclose($handle);