Question

class Aclas {

    private $v = 1;
    private $z;
    protected $y;
    public $xy;
}

$obja = new Aclas;
echo serialize( $obja );

I get the output as follows

O:5:"Aclas":4:{s:8:"Aclasv";i:1;s:8:"Aclasz";N;s:4:"*y";N;s:2:"xy";N;}

but someone please tell me what is s:8 immediately after opening curly brace.

Answer 1

{s:8:"Aclasv", is string, length 8.

I am looking for documentation one sec.

UPDATE:
Not seeming to find any documentation on it. Maybe I’ll look to link corresp. PHP source code… I am curious now too. Might just be easier to reverse engineer and make sense of it.

Best Link
This is pretty cool, code has full parser: https://github.com/ktomk/Serialized

Serialized is a set of classes that can parse serialized data into a normalized
representation (semi structured data or S-expression).