[PHP] Can this code go faster?

[René Fournier]

I've looked in the docs and don't see anything for this per se...
I need to convert a binary number of arbitrary length to a signed 
integer.
This is how I'm doing it now:

CODE
--------
function bin2int ($bin) {
        if (substr($bin,0,1) == 1) {
                $val = 0 - bindec(substr($bin,1));      // NEGATIVE
                } else {
                $val = bindec(substr($bin,1));  // POSITIVE
                }
        }
echo bin2int("00001101").'<br />';
echo bin2int("10001101");
OUTPUT
--------
13
-13
As you can see, if the most-significant bit is 1, then the rest of the 
value is negative. If the first bit is 0, then the rest is positive. Is 
there a better, faster (execution-wise) way of doing this? Maybe a more 
built-in function of PHP I missed? It's something that my script will 
be doing thousands of times, so I am concerned about speed.

Thanks!
...Rene
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