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

When dealing with binary data in PHP, it's important to remember that PHP's string functions may not work as expected due to the nature of binary data. One potential pitfall is that certain functions may interpret null bytes as the end of a string, leading to data truncation. To avoid this issue, it's recommended to use binary-safe functions like `pack()` and `unpack()` when working with binary data.

// Example of using pack() and unpack() for working with binary data
$binaryData = "\x48\x65\x6c\x6c\x6f"; // Binary representation of "Hello"

// Packing binary data
$packedData = pack("H*", bin2hex($binaryData)); // Pack the binary data into a hex string

// Unpacking binary data
$unpackedData = hex2bin(unpack("H*", $packedData)[1]); // Unpack the hex string back into binary data

echo $unpackedData; // Output: Hello