Large hex values with PHP hexdec

Question

I have some large HEX values that I want to display as regular numbers, I was using hexdec() to convert to float, and I found a function on PHP.net to convert that to decima

Answer 1

Run into this issue while storing 64-bit keys in MySQL database. I was able to get a bit perfect conversion to a 64-bit signed integer (PHP limitation) using a few binary operators: (This code is 16x faster than bchexdec function and resulting variables are using half the memory on average).

function x64toSignedInt($k){
    $left = hexdec(substr($k,0,8));
    $right = hexdec(substr($k,8,8));
    return (int) ($left << 32) | $right;
}

MySQL signed BIGINT datatype is a great match for this as an index or storage in general. HEX(column) is a simple way to convert it back to HEX within the SQL query for use elsewhere.