Question

I have the following string: a:2:{s:4:”user”;b:1;s:6:”userid”;s:2:”48″;}

What I need to do is extract number 48 from it, in this case. This number could have any number of digits. How would I go about doing this?

Answer 1

It looks like you are facing a serialized strings. So, instead of trying to get that number using regular expression or any other string manipulation methods, try this:

$myVar = unserialize('a:2:{s:4:"user";b:1;s:6:"userid";s:2:"48";}');
$myNumber = $myVar['userid'];

Learn about PHP serialization here:

http://php.net/manual/en/function.serialize.php
http://php.net/manual/en/function.unserialize.php