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;
}

When i need to read the whole string at that shm pointer, setting the count parameter to zero (0) seems work for me.

With shmop_read, you probably get a "\0" - padded string.

$zero_padded = shmop_read($shm_seg, 0, 128);

$usable_string = rtrim($zero_padded, "\0");

Also you can use the shmop_size() function to determine the block size.