Question

I was looking through the WordPress core, and I found this function:

function unserialize ( $data ) {
    return unserialize( $data );
}

First off, I don’t even understand why unserialize has been defined since its a native php function. Secondly, what in the world is going on here since its defined recursively without any condition to halt infinite recursion?

Throw me a bone. I’m newbie at this stuff.

Answer 1

That’s got to be method definition in a class, eg:

class SomeClass
{
    function unserialize($data) 
    { 
        return unserialize($data);
    }

    // ...
}

Otherwise you’d get a fatal error saying that you can’t redeclare unserialize().

All it does is add an unserialize() method to a class. This method then calls the native unserialize() function in PHP. Seems rather silly, but then, I didn’t write WordPress.

---

I believe I found the method in question: wp-includes/rss.php (line 783). And it’s indeed a method of the RSSCache class.

I suppose it’s possible they might want to write their own serialization routine in the future and/or some subclass of RSSCache has its own serialize() and unserialize().