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In this blog entry Arnold Daniels talks about an issue he had in the past (needing a bit more functionality than the PEAR DB library could offer) and how he ended up solving it with what he calls a "dark corner" of PHP - class casting.

PHP has a function serialize, which can create a hash from any type of variable, scalars, array, but objects as well. Using the unserialize function, PHP can recreate the variable from the serialized hashed. If we look at how an object is serialized, we see only the properties and the class name are stored.

His method allows for class manipulation via changes to the serialized class information (like changing the value of the name parameter). His "casttoclass()" function makes changing this value simple.

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DevShed:
Fetching Search Results as Serialized Arrays with Yahoo Web Services and PHP 5

by Chris Cornutt January 16, 2008 @ 07:51:00

DevShed has continued their series looking at using the Yahoo! web services with PHP5 in part two - their look at returning the results of a query in serialized arrays.

I'll show you how to parse the results returned by a determined web search service using a few array PHP processing functions. [...] Let's learn how to fetch results returned by the different Yahoo! Search Web Services in the form of serialized PHP arrays

You'll probably want to check out part one of the series before forging on to this second installment - there's a lot of good introductory information in there. With all of that information ingested, you'll have no problem following along with this next part.

They show how to get the results back from a search in an XML format and how, with the simple addition of an optional "output" parameter, can get the same information back in something PHP can natively use (the arrays).

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Pavel Shevaev's Blog:
A reliable way to serialize/unserialize objects in PHP

by Chris Cornutt December 11, 2007 @ 12:09:00

Pavel Shevaev has posted his method (a reliable way) for serializing and unserializing objects in your applications:

An experienced PHP developer might be wondering why posting this topic in a blog if PHP already has universal and almost transparent tools for this job [...] The key statement here is "almost transparent" which means you have to include all class definitions before invoking unserialize or use some __autoload schema.

The whole problem is due to the fact a serialized object has no idea about its class definition except the class name(the reason behind that is absolutely valid). [...] That's why I decided to hack up, hopefully, a more universal solution to this problem

His method contains things inside of a "serialization container" that automagically includes everything needed before it gets serialized. His code for the method is included as well as some examples of its use.

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Make Me Pulse Blog:
Serialize and Unserialize SimpleXML in php

by Chris Cornutt September 28, 2007 @ 09:30:00

From the "Make Me Pulse" blog (of Nicolas Rajabaly & Antoine Ughetto) there's a quick example of how to use serialized values with SimpleXML:

Serialize is useful for storing or passing PHP values around without losing type and structure. But if you want to serialize a SimpleXml object, you will have some problem on unserialize with the error. [...] Replacing SimpleXMLObject with stdClass is a good idea but in this solution we loose all of attributes, and how can we make simplexml->xpath after?

The solution? Serializing the XML content and then outputting it from the SimpleXML object as an XML string (to be stored). This process is reversed when the data is needed back out.

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Evert Pot's Blog:
PHP serializer in userland code

by Chris Cornutt June 21, 2007 @ 09:43:00

In this new blog post today, Evert Pot shares some thoughts on a custom solution he was looking to create as an alternative for PHP's serialize function.

I wanted to build this as a helper class for a draft-PHP-RPC server. The reason I needed a custom one was because I wanted to make sure I would be able to spit out PHP4-compatible serialized data, and in the future, when its ported to PHP6, also PHP5-compatible data.

He came across several issues in the development process including the slowness of his method compared to serialize() and a lack of a way to tell if two variables reference the same data. If you'd like to check out what he has so far, he's 0 comments voice your opinion now!
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Stubbles Blog:
Lazy loading of classes stored in a session without __autoload()

by Chris Cornutt March 19, 2007 @ 10:39:00

On the Stubbles blog today, there's a warning from Frank Kleine about using the session.auto_start setting in your PHP installation and it preventing you from working with objects. As per the PHP manual:

If you do turn on session.auto_start then you cannot put objects into your sessions since the class definition has to be loaded before starting the session in order to recreate the objects in your session.

Frank points out that this also includes calling session_start before defining other classes to be used. They've come up with their own solution, though, using a base interface object for all of their classes. This object is included in each of the pages, eliminating the worry about having multiple objects and classes to mess with.

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Brian Moon's Blog:
Big arrays in PHP

by Chris Cornutt February 27, 2007 @ 07:50:00

In his latest blog entry, Brian Moon takes a look at using big arrays in PHP - how efficient it is and what can be done to ease things a bit.

So, at dealnews, we have a category tree. To make life easy, we dump it to an array in a file that we can include on any page. It has 420 entries. So, I was curious how efficient this was. I noticed that some code that was using this array was jumping in memory usage as soon as I ran the script.

His tests showed that the memory jump from before and after the array was significant (5 MB for his test). He tested different methods of storage for the array including a var_export and serializing the data (the lowest memory option).

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DevShed:
Working with MySQL and Sessions to Serialize Objects in PHP (Part 3)

by Chris Cornutt June 20, 2006 @ 11:58:59

DevShed has posted the third and final part of their "Serializing Objects in PHP" series today with a focus on integrating all of their previous code with a MySQL database.

Provided that you've already grasped the key concepts about object serialization, in addition to implementing some advanced features, such as the ones I mentioned right at the beginning of this article, in this final installment of the series, I'll show you some examples of how to work with objects and sessions. I'll also show you how to use MySQL tables to keep your objects safe and healthy.

They briefly touch on the code from the previous part, showing how to automatically serialize the objects easily. With that in place, they illustrate how to expand upon it, to combine these objects with sessions to register/store/retrieve them. Finally, they cover taking these same objects and storing them to a database (MySQL), including an example of handling user information.

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DevShed:
Using the Sleep and Wakeup Functions to Serialize Objects in PHP (Part 2)

by Chris Cornutt June 13, 2006 @ 08:11:34

DevShed continues their "serializing objects" series today with part two of the series, highlighting the use of the sleep and wakeup functionality of PHP to help with the serialization.

After refreshing the concepts that I deployed in the first part of this series, it's time to focus on the topics that I'll cover in this article, so you'll know what to expect before you continue reading. In this second part, I'll explain how to use objects in conjunction with the "__sleep()" and "__wakeup() magic functions respectively, in order to get the most out of them.

They start with a look at defining self-saving objects with their ObjectSaver class developed earlier. Building on that reminder, they integrate the "__sleep()" and "__wakeup()" functionality to handle calls immediately before and immediately after the handling of the object. They then use this new functionality to create persistent objects, capable of maintaining values across page requests.