Specification for serialize()

[Daniel Klein]

It looks like I'm going to have to write programs in another language to
encode and decode php serialized data. I am really only interested in the
permutations of how it encodes multi-dimensioned arrays holding various data
types.

Is there a formal spec for how serialize() does it's thing? I can certainly
intuit much of this from looking at the results but I don't want to miss
coding for some (obscure) data type.

Daniel Klein

[C. (http://symcbean.blogspot.com/)]

On 16 Mar, 01:04, Daniel Klein <[e-mail]:

It looks like I'm going to have to write programs in another language to
encode and decode php serialized data. I am really only interested in the
permutations of how it encodes multi-dimensioned arrays holding various data
types.

Is there a formal spec for how serialize() does it's thing? I can certainly
intuit much of this from looking at the results but I don't want to miss
coding for some (obscure) data type.

Daniel Klein

Its fairly straightforward - if you serialize some stuff and write it
to disk you'll see - but it always feels wrong to me to use
serialization as a storage / messaging format since the format does
not seem to have a formal, published definition.

How painful could it it be to write the data in a format you define
yourself? Or use an off-the-shelf XML mapper?

C.

[Daniel Klein]

On Sun, 16 Mar 2008 14:56:28 -0700 (PDT), "C.
(http://symcbean.blogspot.com/)" <co************@gmail.comwrote:

>On 16 Mar, 01:04, Daniel Klein <[e-mail]:

>It looks like I'm going to have to write programs in another language to
encode and decode php serialized data. I am really only interested in the
permutations of how it encodes multi-dimensioned arrays holding various data
types.

Is there a formal spec for how serialize() does it's thing? I can certainly
intuit much of this from looking at the results but I don't want to miss
coding for some (obscure) data type.

Daniel Klein

Its fairly straightforward - if you serialize some stuff and write it
to disk you'll see - but it always feels wrong to me to use
serialization as a storage / messaging format since the format does
not seem to have a formal, published definition.

How painful could it it be to write the data in a format you define
yourself? Or use an off-the-shelf XML mapper?

C.

The intention was to use the result of the serialization as an intermediate
format, not for database storage.

But you're right, I am better off rolling my own.

Dan