shmop_read() reads and returns the whole memory segment's data. This is not useful if you're just working with strings. If you need to read a string from shared memory, call str_from_mem() on the result of shmop_read(). Similarly when writing strings to memory (instead of binary data), null terminate your strings with str_to_nts() before passing the value on to shmop_write().
function str_to_nts($value) {
return "$value\0";
}
function str_from_mem(&$value) {
$i = strpos($value, "\0");
if ($i === false) {
return $value;
}
$result = substr($value, 0, $i);
return $result;
}