Saving big string in php using quercus

Question

Hi folks,

I'm using quercus for appengine. I tried saving a long php string (> 1000 characters) but appengine won't allow me as String can only hold 500 characters. So I tried using appengine's Text datatype. It lets me save, however, when I retrieve the data from PHP, it returns me a resource() type instead of string.

Let me explain with code:

<?php
$a = new Text("this is a long string that contains more than 1000 characters");
$b = "this is a long string that contains more than 1000 characters";
$e = new Entity('Article');
$e->setProperty('content', $a); // this works fine
// $e->setProperty('content', $b); // will complain as strlen($b) is > 500
$db = DatastoreServiceFactory::getDatastoreService();
$id = KeyFactory::keyToString($db->put($e)); // works ok, returns the ID of Entity saved
?>

Now all's fine and dandy, but when I retrieve the content of $e, it will return me a resource() type data.

<?php
$q = new Query('Article');
$ps = $db->prepare($q);
foreach($ps->asIterable() as $i) {
    echo gettype($i->getProperty('content')); // this will echo Object, which when var_dump'd, gives me a resource() which is not convertible to php string, thus I can't get the human readable value
}
?>

Is there any workaround to this? Any help is GREATLY appreciated as I've been pulling my hair for days...