When building my website "Crossword Heaven" I came across a
problem. I created a PHP object called "crossword" but needed to
save the information in the object to a database. Now
considering that this object contained a lot of information this
was not an easy thing to do. Or was it?
The answer: serialize().
What the serialize() function does is take something like an
array or object and converts it into a string that can be stored
in a database. All I had to do so that I could save the
crossword object is something like "serialize($crossword)."
Easy! Some words of warning though. If you're using a version of
PHP less than version 4 watch out because only properties get
saved, not methods.
Here's a peek at the actual code:
$data = addslashes(serialize($crossword)); $name="";
if(isset($xwordInfo['xword_name'])){ $name =
$xwordInfo['xword_name']; } $today = date('Y-m-d H-i-s'); $sql =
"INSERT INTO `xword` ( `xword_id` , `xword_obj` , `xword_name`,
`xword_owner`, `xword_width`, `xword_height`,`xword_date`)
VALUES ('', '" . $data . "', '$name', '$owner', '$width',
'$height', '$today');";
And here's the SQL to create the table 'xword':
CREATE TABLE `xword` ( `xword_id` int(11) NOT NULL
auto_increment, `xword_obj` blob NOT NULL, `xword_name`
varchar(100) NOT NULL default '', `xword_owner` varchar(100) NOT
NULL default '', `xword_width` int(11) NOT NULL default '0',
`xword_height` int(11) NOT NULL default '0', `xword_date`
datetime NOT NULL default '0000-00-00 00:00:00', PRIMARY KEY
(`xword_id`) ) TYPE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=1 ;
You'll see that I used the addSlashes() function. That's because
when the crossword object was serialized it contained characters
like double quotes. These had to be escaped before the crossword
could be saved to the database.
Now having saved a crossword object to a database I had to have
a way to get it back. Surely, if there was a method to serialize
an object there had to be one to unserialize an object, right?
And yes, there is: unserialize().
As you'd expect, unserialize() works the same way as
serialize(), but in the opposite direction. You give it some
serialized data and it returns the thing that was serialized. To
get the crossword back all I had to do was something like
"unserialize($crosswordData)."
Here's a look at the code:
$xwordId = (get_magic_quotes_gpc()) ? $xwordId :
addslashes($xwordId); $sql = "SELECT xword_id, xword_obj,
xword_name, xword_age from w3b_xword where xword_id=$xwordId";
$result = parent::getSQL($sql); $row = parent::getRow($result);
if(parent::getNumRows($result)>0){ $crossword =
unserialize($row['xword_obj']); }
And that's it. Obviously serialize() and unserialize() are
pretty handy functions to have around. And in my case I couldn't
do without them.
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