Question

I wonder if this would be doable ? To insert an array into one field in the database.

For instance I have a title, I want to have that title with only one id, but it’s going to be bilingually used on the website.

It feels a bit unnecessary to make another table to have their global ids and then another table with the actual titles linked to the table with the global id.

I just want to have something like this

ID      TITLE 1       Array('english title', 'nederlandse titel'); 

I’m using PHP/MSYQL, so if it would be doable could you please explain in these languages.

Oh yeah I figured that I could format it funky and use the split function to turn it into an array again. But I wonder if I could just store it as an array right away, I case the user might type something with the same formatting (one out of a million)

Answer 1

it’s doable:

$title = serialize($array); 

and then to decode:

$title = unserialize($mysql_data); 

but as mentioned it really lessens the benefits of a database in the first place. i’d definitely suggest looking into a multi-table or multi-column option instead, depending on the amount of languages you want to support and if that number will change in the future.

edit: a good point mentioned by dcousineau (see comments)

Sometimes the serialized output, even after escaping, throws characters into the query that screws things up. You may want to wrap your serialize() in base64_encode() calls and then use base64_decode() before you unserialize.

adjusted code for those situations:

$title = base64_encode(serialize($array) ); $title = unserialize(base64_decode($mysql_data) );