Hi internals, A regular annoyance with our test suite is that var_dump() prints null bytes literally, those null bytes get into our test expectations, the test is interpreted as a binary file by git, and diffs will not be shown on GitHub.
Of course, the null bytes are also confusing to the reader, as many editors will not display them, and the only indication that they are there is the string length. https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/7059 does a surgical change to replace null bytes with \0. A potential problem is that this no longer allows an easy distinction between "\0" and "\\0", as both will be printed as "\0". We could resolve this by additionally escaping \ (and presumably "). See https://gist.github.com/nikic/d3d74d88178ea6946305e0b2d38a84f9 for an rough idea on the impact on Zend and ext/standard tests. So, I'd be interested in knowing a) whether var_dump() should be performing any escaping at all, and if yes b) how much we should be escaping. Just \0, both \0 and \ to avoid ambiguity, or a larger set of control characters? Regards, Nikita
