It appears that mcrypt_decrypt pads the *RETURN STRING* with nulls ('\0') to fill out to n * blocksize. For old C-programmers, like myself, it is easy to believe the string ends at the first null. In PHP it does not:
strlen("abc\0\0") returns 5 and *NOT* 3
strcmp("abc", "abc\0\0") returns -2 and *NOT* 0
I learned this lesson painfully when I passed a string returned from mycrypt_decrypt into a NuSoap message, which happily passed the nulls along to the receiver, who couldn't figure out what I was talking about.
My solution was:
<?php
$retval = mcrypt_decrypt( ...etc ...);
$retval = rtrim($retval, "\0"); ?>
