Comments on: PHP Serialize() & Unserialize() Issues

By: Kasimir

Kasimir — Mon, 14 May 2012 13:21:11 +0000

This not only solves problems serializing data with quotes and stuff, but also is a solution if you want to save an array with different kinds of data (text and binary, for instance) and don’t want to worry about corruption somewhere along the way.

Yes, the downside is your data increases in size when encoding, but serious amounts of data should not be stored in serialized format in a database anyway. For small amounts, it’s really not a big issue and a great solution.

By: Rashaad

Rashaad — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 06:05:10 +0000

Saved my ass on that one!! Thanks a bunch!

By: Kaustubh

Kaustubh — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 13:09:20 +0000

Problem solved!

Some data truncated by mysql due to large size of data.
Sorry!!!
It works!

By: Kaustubh

Kaustubh — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 12:08:53 +0000

hi,
I am using base64 encode and decode with serialize and unserialize. I came across following error

Error: Notice: unserialize() [function.unserialize]: Error at offset 2 of 49151 bytes

Some starting bytes before using base64_decode: czo1ODY4MzoiDQoJPHRhY

After using base64 starting bytes are: s:58683:”

By: John Vargo

John Vargo — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 19:30:40 +0000

After 3/4 of a day of banging my head against my monitor, this post helped me solve my problem roundtripping a serialized object to a database. Thanks so much David.

By: Douglas

Douglas — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 08:05:00 +0000

This is a solution, yes, but base64-encoding the string makes it about 33% larger which isn’t nice for large chunks of data. I’d rather see a solution implemented strictly for the serialize() function, such as the one suggested by ‘suman’ (http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.unserialize.php#107886):

$auctionDetails = preg_replace('!s:(\d+):"(.*?)";!se', "'s:'.strlen('$2').':\"$2\";'", $dataArr[$i]['auction_details'] ); $auctionDetails = unserialize($auctionDetails);

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 15:37:02 +0000

Thanks so much. You saved me! Stackoverflow had nothing.

By: mina

mina — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 14:52:10 +0000

After two hours of unsuccessful efforts, I found your post and been saved!
thanks!

By: Nick Woodhead

Nick Woodhead — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 12:58:12 +0000

Thank you for you help!

Although your solution wasn’t quite enough to get it to work for me it was definitely part of the solution. I was trying to store the serialized string to my sql server db in a text field. After I realized that the ” were causing problems with unserialize and used the base64_encode I then realized that the string was being truncated when retrieving it from the db. The easiest way I found to get around this was to make these 2 changes in php.ini

mssql.textlimit = 2147483647
mssql.textsize = 2147483647

They were set by default to 4096 and were commented out so remember to remove the ; too.

Hope this helps someone.

By: Candace Camarillo

Candace Camarillo — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 04:28:33 +0000

I am having a very similar issue after deploying to a production server. I tried your copy/paste technique and had the same results.

Did you ever discover what was causing your unserialize issue after moving servers?