I have an Informix 9.14.UC3 database that has some data in ifxmrdata or html data types. These fields contain data beyond 256 bytes, often more then 11,000 bytes. 

I have tried to get to the data using two different methods. 

1) Cast the unsupported data types to lvarchar. An example would be my_big_field::lvarchar. This just hangs the php program and never seems to return.

2) Cast the unsupported data types to lvarchar then char(n). An example would be my_big_field::lvarchar::char(8192). This works for some tables but has two problems. a) On some fields it crashes the web server with a signal 11. b) If the data is only 2 bytes long I still get 8192 bytes of data because the database fills the extra bytes with spaces. This does not work because there are instances where I need 30K of data and I can't return 30K of spaces for each record. These problems occur whether I use the ifx_htmltbl_result or retrieve the individual row.

I played around with the source code and found some bazaar results. If I change the SQLLVARCHAR handler in the ifx_htmltbl_result section to a simple loop that does a putchar(ch) for each character, it will output all the data but still cause the signal 11. If instead put out a fixed character in place of the actual character, like an 'x', then I get all the x's returned and the server does NOT crash... If I output the actual character then a fixed character, like "w:o:r:d:", the server does NOT crash. It's only when I output the actual characters that the server crashes. It doesn't seem to matter what is in the actual data. The content is only regular html content (words, metatags). This is so strange. I have tried outputting extra spaces before and after the actual data but the server crashes.

I really need to find a work around for this problem. Is it possible?

--Destry