Question

I’m looking an ability to decode and encode internal PHP session format.

There is way to create custom session handler in PHP

http://www.php.net/manual/en/class.sessionhandlerinterface.php

However I’m looking for a method to understand its content. For example I want that
that in PHP $_SESSION("user_id") and in some other framework session().get("user_id") would return the same string.

The only stuff I found is: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.session-encode.php
and it only says it is internal format.

Is there any reference documentation for that?

Answer 1

You find a lot of documentation (see the README file and the docs folder) of that within the Serialized PHP Library, it also allows you to change the format into XML and other formats.

SERIALIZE TYPE IDENTIFICATION CHARS

In a serialized string, each chunk of data is prefixed by a single character (case sensitive) signalling the type (a-z sorted):

• a – Array
• b – Boolean
• C – Object implementing serializeable Interface
• d – Float
• i – Integer
• N – NULL
• O – Object
• r – Recursion
• R – Recursion by Reference
• s – String
• S – Encoded String (PHP 6 upwards compatibility)

The library supports as well session serialization which is very close to standard value serialization and outlined in the docs, too.