Issues with PHP's serialization format
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hfuecks
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Issues with PHP's serialization format - Posted: December 23, 2004 - 1:08 AM
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Hi,
First great stuff with phpBeans. Notice you're using PHP's serialization format (as generated by serialize / unserialize).
I've used it before as well in JPSpan (http://jpspan.sf.net) but have now basically replaced it with an XML representation of a data structure, primarily because of the way strings are encoded with serialize() and multibyte characters. PHP is unaware of multibyte characters, as illustrated by this example;
echo serialize('HÃllo');
Gives;
s:8:"HÃllo";
In other words, although there's only 6 readable characters, PHP sees 8 bytes.
The problem is when you start using this format across multiple systems where different charsets are being used by default and different languages which _are_ aware of multibyte characters (e.g. Javascript where I've personally run into the problem).
Anyway - I put up some notes up here: http://jpspan.sourceforge.net/wiki/doku.php?id=php:serialization#implementations - there's also implementations in other languages listed.
In the end I'd recommend using a different format (probably XML). I wrote one for JPSpan which is roughly described here: http://jpspan.sourceforge.net/wiki/doku.php?id=encoding:jpspanxml and there's a PHP parser for it available here http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/jpspan/jpspan/JPSpan/Unserializer/XML.php?view=markup - it's close enough to PHP's serialization format in it's basic structure to make it easy to replace. As you're using LGPL, feel free to re-use anything you like
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