For quite sometime now I have been really annoyed by the unreliability of serialize and unserialize , when you would have a large string or some some special characters in there that wouldnt turn back into variables. So finally after not finding a decent alternative by someone else ( maybe I am only one suffering from the problem????? ) , I decided to write my own two functions.

These two are working great for me , hope they serve some purpose to someone else. I am sure there is room for improvement here, please send in any suggestions or ideas to incorporate.

  1.  
  2.         /// Usage
  3.         ////– first parameter is the var name , second is the var itself
  4.         $string = makeXML(’somevarname’ , $somevarname);
  5.  
  6.         ////— extractVars takes the above string as parameter ,
  7.         ////— and returns an arrray with variable name as key and variable itself
  8.         ///—  as value , i have used extract() to take all vars into code.
  9.         extract(extractVars($string));
  10.  
  11.  
  12.         function extractVars($xml , $name=” , $type=”){
  13.                 $reg="!<xmlvar name=\’(.*?)\’ type=’(.*?)’>(.*?)</xmlvar name=\’\\1\’>!s";
  14.                 preg_match_all($reg , $xml , $matches);
  15.  
  16.                 foreach($matches[1] as $index=>$key){
  17.                         $optname = $key;
  18.                         $opttype = $matches[2][$index];
  19.                         $optval = $matches[3][$index];
  20.  
  21.                         $optxpl = explode("::" , $optname);
  22.                         $optname = $optxpl[count($optxpl)-1];
  23.  
  24.                         if($opttype == ‘object’){
  25.                                 $bigarr[$optname] = (object)extractVars($optval , $optname , $opttype);
  26.                         }elseif($opttype==‘array’){
  27.                                 $bigarr[$optname] = extractVars($optval , $optname , $opttype);
  28.                         }else{
  29.                                 $bigarr[$optname] = $optval;
  30.                         }
  31.                 }
  32.  
  33.                 return $bigarr;
  34.         }
  35.  
  36.  
  37.  
  38.         function makeXML($name , $var="" , $parent = NULL ){
  39.                 if(!is_null($parent)) $parent = $parent."::";
  40.  
  41.                 if(is_object($var)){
  42.                         $xml .= "<xmlvar name=’$parent$name’ type=’object’>";
  43.                         foreach($var as $key=>$val){
  44.                                 $xml .= makeXML($key , $val , $parent.$name);
  45.                         }
  46.                         $xml .= "</xmlvar name=’$parent$name’>\r\n";
  47.                 }elseif(is_array($var)){
  48.                         $xml .= "<xmlvar name=’$parent$name’ type=’array’>";
  49.                         foreach($var as $key=>$val){
  50.                                 $xml .= $tab.makeXML($key , $val , $parent.$name);
  51.                         }
  52.                         $xml .= "</xmlvar name=’$parent$name’>\r\n";
  53.                 }elseif(is_bool($var)){
  54.                         $xml .= "<xmlvar name=’$parent$name’ type=’bool’>";
  55.                         $xml .= "$var";
  56.                         $xml .= "</xmlvar name=’$parent$name’>\r\n";
  57.                 }else{
  58.                         $xml .= "<xmlvar name=’$parent$name’ type=’string’>";
  59.                         $xml .= "$var";
  60.                         $xml .= "</xmlvar name=’$parent$name’>\r\n";
  61.                 }
  62.                 return $xml;
  63.         }
  64.