Question

I’m trying to find the content of an array on a remote server. All I can send back currently is strings (due to limitations in the PHP implementation of xmlrpc). Normally, I’d just use var_dump(), but that returns void. I’ve tried using var_export, but I get XML errors, even when I cast the result to a string.

How can I get the string representation of an array?

Answer 1

Use serialize():

$string = serialize( $array);

Then use unserialize() to get it back into an array:

$array = unserialize( $string);

You can also use json_encode() / json_decode() if you’re interested in a JSON formatted string.

$string = json_encode( $array);
$array = json_decode( $string);