Question

O.K. so I’m pretty clever – I’ve made a library for keeping a bunch of WP themes that are all set up to my needs so when I put out a new site I can just create the new blog in a few minutes.

As a holder for the new domain everything in the sql file that has the old domain in it I replace with [token].

Everything was working fine right up to the point where I made one with a child theme that apparently serialized data before entering it into the database. End up with stuff like this:

Theme','a:8:{s:12:\"header_image\";s:92:\"http://[token]wp-content/uploads/2011/05/494-Caring-for-fruit-trees-PLR.jpg\";s:16:\"background_image

So I dig into serialization and it turnss out that s:92 bit for example is the number of characters in that value. Since i’m changing [token] it changes and breaks.

Up till now I did all my changes to the sql file and didn’t edit the database other than to populate it with the sql file – but I’m at a loss on how to deal with the data in the serial array.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Easiest way would be to grab that data and use the unserialize() function, like

$arr = unserialize($data); 

Then edit the data that way. When you’re done, re-serialize it with serialize(), and store it back. You may have to to do a print_r() on the unserialized data to see how it’s stored to see what you need to edit.

If you do the changes directly from the serialized data, you’ll have to get the length of the current substring, make the change, then get the new length and splice that back into the serialized data, which is way more complicated than it needs to be.