PHP: file() each character is preceded by "\0"

I have an INI file that has been created by an AutoHotKey program written by another member of a team I am working on. I am trying to read the file into PHP as an array. I am using the built in file() function. When I read in the file and then display it using var_dump($file) ($file is the name of the array the file is being read into) each character is preceded by a "\0"(which is a null character). Each Has an开发者_如何转开发yone seen this happen before? I could just remove all the null characters after I read in the file, but I would prefer to find a solution.

When I open the ini file in text editors it opens just fine. I also read in using the file() function the desktop.ini file created by Windows and it read in as expected, the characters were not preceded by "\0"

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It has to do with the encoding of the file. Some (most) unicode encodings require 2 bytes per character. This means that each single byte character is prefixed with a \0. The file is still perfectly valid, but if you try to read it with a windows-1252 type single byte encoding it will look odd. You can try feeding it through utf8_decode and see if that clears it up. UTF 8 is a potential multibyte encoding from 1 to 4 bytes (with a minimum of 1). Your text editor automatically figure this out and opens it as unicode which is why it looks fine there.

Note: because it uses a 2 byte encoding, it is specifically not utf-8, it may be utf-16, but the UTF-8 functions may be able to parse it.

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have you opened the file in a HEX Editor? There are probably hidden characters in your file...