While prepending the + seems a bit pointless, that's what + does in sprintf. You don't need to add it to get a "signed" binary number:
sprintf() seems to switch to signed mode automatically when a negative number is presented, which is clever but to me seems fundamentally flawed, if you're trying to interchange data. You certainly don't want a field to be encoded one way for certain situations but another way the rest of the time. There doesn't appear to be a way to force unsigned encoding, which makes things difficult when trying to pack data, right?
array_sscanf(sprintf("%-4c", -65335), "%-+4c");(2) Result: ({ /* 1 element */ -65335 })
