PHP8 with ODBC connection to InterSystems IRIS returning NULL for fields VARCHAR(30000)

I am very new to IRIS. We are developing a PHP application that connects to an IRIS instance of one of our vendors. This works well most of the time, but when I query a table to get data from particular fields that contain long text strings, it returns `NULL`. These fields are all `VARCHAR(30000)`.

I tried using the `$extract` functionality in the IRIS documentation, but that made no difference. I also tried setting the PHP setting `odbc.defaultlrl` to both 31K and 0. Neither resolved the issue.

I also looked through the internet to try and find a similar issue, but wasn't able to find anything

Is anyone else experiencing a similar problem or is there a known solution to this issue?