Re: Sessions and serializing (was: Checking data inserted

Hi Lynna,

on 5/12/04 7:36 PM, Chris at chris(at)interspire(dot)com wrote:

> You could serialize up the data in sessions and then use that data
> before adding it to the database. See http://www.php.net/serialize and

> http://www.php.net/unserialize and http://www.php.net/session

> OK, so if I understand this correctly, the serialize function can take
something like a big associative array containing all the data I want to
be able to write into the database and condense it into a single object
that can be passed via a hidden form field or something to that effect,
correct? Or the data can be put into the session array using $_SESSION,
and then passed by using a $session_id in the page URL?

You won't need to use unserialize and serialize per page if you're going
to use sessions - you only need those if you're going to pass the values
in a URL or in a hidden form field.

For sessions, you can simply
$my_array = array('1','2','3','4','5');
$_SESSION['blah'] = $my_array;

sort of thing..

> But according to one of the user comments in the manual I have to use
> addslashes() and stripslashes() if I want to be able to put the data
into the database after unserializing it - is that right?

Yep. So you'll need to do
$value = addslashes(serialize($real_value));

and use $value in your query...

Then when you fetch out

$real_value = unserialize(stripslashes($value));

Done =)

> Also, what about character encoding? My database and my web pages are
utf-8 because of the presence of special characters in some of the
artists and names and image and exhibition titles (it's a Canadian
gallery, so there are a lot of French artists). Will serializing the
array containing the data affect that in any way?

Not as far as I know, it should handle that fine.

> Sorry if I'm being a pest - the whole session thing is new to me and I
want to make sure I understand it correctly.

Ask as many questions as you need to, we've all been at the start before
=)