why does unserialize in PHP keep returning false?

Question

I've just written the easiest script in the world, but still I can't get it to work, and it's mighty strange. Here's the deal, what I want to do is to use jQuery to catch some input field values and serialize them with jQuery's serialize(); I then send the serialized string to the server to unserialize it. Here's the output I get from the serializing in jQuery, this is what I send to the server.

field1=value1&field2=value2&field3=value3

And here's the function;

public function unserialize_input()
{
    $str = $this->input->post("user_values");
    $unserialized = unserialize($str);
    var_dump($unserialized);
}

as I said, if I go "echo $str;" I get "field1=value1&field2=value2&field3=value3", so the string should be unserializable. How ever, I always get the same error message and the var_dump($unserialized); always returns bool(false);

Here's the error message I get from CodeIgniter, the framework I'm using for PHP.

Severity: Notice
Message: unserialize() [<ahref='function.unserialize'>function.unserialize</a>]: Error at offset 0 of 41 bytes

bool(false)

I'm using MAMP and running this locally at the moment, I read something about magic_quotes_gpc being OFF could cause this locally, but it's enabled. Any idea what might be wrong would be helpful. Thanks.

Answer 1

this is going to be a bit vague because i don't know jQuery overly well, but could it be that jQuery serialize's strings even slightly different from PHP? If so then that would cause the error message that you see

Answer 2

PHP's serialize and unserialize is to destruct and construct PHP objects/arrays/values.

Jquery serialize serializes a form into a POST string which can be very handy to do ajax calls. A post string is not a valid serialized string in PHP and cannot be reconstructed to a PHP mixed value and thus it returns false.

Answer 3

You're using the wrong PHP function. You should use parse_str instead.

 parse_str($str, $unserialized);

Answer 4

Works for me too! thanks a lot man