PHP unserialize() Error at Offset [duplicate] - php

Question

This question already has answers here:
How to repair a serialized string which has been corrupted by an incorrect byte count length?
(17 answers)
Closed 9 years ago.
The exact error I am getting is:
ErrorException [ Notice ]: unserialize(): Error at offset 5 of 59 bytes
The serialized data returned from a TEXT field in MySQL is (Encoding: utf8, Engine: InnoDB):
a:1:{s:12:"display_name";s:6:"Foo";}
After unserializing the output is:
array(1) { [0]=> bool(false) }
I am expecting something like this:
array(1) { ["display_name"]=> string(6) "Foo" }
I am using FuelPHP 1.6.1, PHP 5.4.10, MySQL 5.5.29, InnoDB 1.1.8 on Mac OS 10.8.4. Some of the serialized entries work on unserialize while others don't, if I copy one that works and paste into one that does not it shows the same error. I believe its a character issue and I have tried to encode into utf8, urlencode, and stripslashes but nothing seems to work.
Any help is appreciated!
Update
The serialized string had a type, I did this when pasting it here for privacy to the actual display name. Here is the actual string:
a:1:{s:12:"display_name";s:3:"Foo";}
Thanks to #robw for pointing this out.
Update & Answer
I am running the serialized data through html_entity_decode() now as such:
$unserialized = unserialize(html_entity_decode($serialized, ENT_QUOTES));
Thank you for the help and advice!

Answer 1

Your problem is here: s:6:"Foo"
Foo is not 6 characters long... so that will never parse as expected.
Try: s:3:"Foo"
PS: This looks like you edited data in MySQL, then when your application tried to parse it, it errored out. You should never edit a serialized value in the database unless you're 100% sure you've modified the LENGTH in accordance to the TYPE and VALUE.