Serialize/Unserialize database data? - php

Question

Is it possible to serialize data posted by a form, and insert it into a database, and then if it needs updating, unserialize it, and just update the data that was changed?
If it is possible, would someone be kind enough to provide/write a small script to do this?

Answer 1

To answer your question directly all you need to do is:
$data = serialize($_POST);
$sql = "INSERT INTO `table` (`data`) VALUES ('".addslashes($data)."')";
...
However I would strongly recommend you don't serialize the data and put it into the database. It'll make the data very difficult to search, update, etc. You'll be forced to rely on your application to maintain the data integrity!
I would suggest designing a database table that fits in with your form's structure... If your form structure is dynamic, then you'll need to create multiple tables in order to store the data.

Answer 2

Yes, you can do this, but it's not clear why you would want/need to. It'd be difficult/impossible to query the serialized data once it's in the database, and to update it you would have to pull the data from the database, unserialize it, update it, serialize it, and update the appropriate row.

Answer 3

You could encode the POSTDATA using JSON and store in database. When you need the data back, just decode the JSON.

Answer 4

Here's a function to extract single string values from serialized data...
Usage would be something like...
SELECT PARSE_PHP_SERIALIZED_DATA_STRING(
`serialized_data`, 'EmailAddress'
)
FROM `your_table`
WHERE `serialized_data` LIKE '%EmailAddress%'
Here's the function:
DELIMITER $$
--
-- Functions
--
DROP FUNCTION IF EXISTS `PARSE_PHP_SERIALIZED_DATA_STRING`$$
CREATE FUNCTION `PARSE_PHP_SERIALIZED_DATA_STRING`(str_data BLOB, str_index VARCHAR(252)) RETURNS varchar(255)
DETERMINISTIC
BEGIN
-- Declare variables must be done at top of BEGIN END
DECLARE start_pos INT;
DECLARE string_out VARCHAR(255);
DECLARE string_search VARCHAR(255);
DECLARE quote_string VARCHAR(6);
-- The indexes in a php serialized string are quoted and end with a semi-colon
-- Setting the quote string incase the "developer" before you (who thought
-- it was a good idea to dump serialized data in to a single column) then also
-- randomly html encoded the string every third row.
SET quote_string = '"';
SET string_search = CONCAT(quote_string, str_index, quote_string, ';');
-- search for the index
SET start_pos = LOCATE(string_search, str_data);
IF start_pos = 0 THEN
-- not found it so lets search again but with html entities
SET quote_string = '"';
SET string_search = CONCAT(quote_string, str_index, quote_string, ';');
SET start_pos = LOCATE(string_search, str_data);
END IF;
-- still not found it, then it is not there as an index
IF start_pos = 0 THEN RETURN '';
END IF;
-- cut up the string to get just the value
-- the offsets here work for string values
-- maybe a different function for integer values??
SET start_pos = start_pos + LENGTH(string_search);
SET string_out = SUBSTRING(str_data, start_pos,255);
IF SUBSTRING(string_out,1,2) = 'N;' THEN
RETURN '';
END IF;
SET string_out = SUBSTRING(string_out, LOCATE(quote_string,string_out)+LENGTH(quote_string), LOCATE(quote_string,string_out,LOCATE(quote_string,string_out)+1));
SET string_out = SUBSTRING(string_out, 1,LOCATE(quote_string,string_out)-1);
RETURN string_out;
END$$
DELIMITER ;