PHP's strlen function behaves differently than the C strlen function in terms of its handling of null bytes ('\0').
In PHP, a null byte in a string does NOT count as the end of the string, and any null bytes are included in the length of the string.
For example, in PHP:
strlen( "te\0st" ) = 5
In C, the same call would return 2.
Thus, PHP's strlen function can be used to find the number of bytes in a binary string (for example, binary data returned by base64_decode).