Serialize in php

Php to me at least looks more like C or at most C with classes than it does like C++ so that in a way it favors older people. I've never needed classes for anything I've done with Php so the subject hasn't come up.

In C or C++ normally to to do old-fashioned writing and reading of objects or structures of a fixed size, I'd just as soon use structures and fread/fwrite statements, to me at least that's a little bit easier to read.

The problem arises when an object contains pointers to allocated memory and objects can vary in size. C++ IO does not handle that for you; what you'd do normally would be to define << and >> operators which pick up sizes from a header of some sort and then read/write the rest of the object.

I'd assume the main point of any sort of a decent serialization system would be to handle that sort of thing without the need for such metadata in objects.

It's basically like delimiting, or a way to format structured data as a string. So you can do things like take an array and serialize it and store it with the structure as a single value. When you need it back as an array you can unserialize it.

Here is an article with more info:

http://www.devshed.com/c/a/PHP/The-Basics-of-Serializing-Objects-in-PHP/

may be

You can format an array data to string and insert your database,And unserialize it to an array.

where serialize() comes in. You can pass an array to the function, and it will return a string that is essentially the array flattened and mashed down. You can then unserialize() it to obtain the full array once again.

<?php
$the_array = array( "Lorem", "Ipsum", "Dolor" );
$serialized = serialize($the_array);
print $serialized;
?>