How can i unserialize a string?

Question

I have a menu system that uses a drag and drop tree structure to make it easy for a user to modify. When the javascript serializes the string, it does it in the following way:

// Assume each of these items has an ID on with the respective numbers attached
Menu Item 1
  + Menu Item 2
  + Menu Item 3
     + Menu Item 4
Menu Item 5
Menu Item 6
  + Menu Item 7

This will then get serialized as:

1>2>3>>4#5#6>7

The problem with this is that there could be an arbitrary number of sublevels, which makes it difficult to unserialize. I'm using PHP server side to unserialize it but I am at a loss as to what to do.

Any suggestions welcome, even to the method of serialization, I’ll just hack the code.

Answer 1

hmm...

http://uk2.php.net/manual/en/function.serialize.php http://uk2.php.net/manual/en/function.unserialize.php

so: $var_name = serialize( "Menu Item 1, Menu Item 2, Menu Item 3, etc...");

// do whatever

$var_name2 = unserialize($var_name);

Would that be a good method for you to use?

Answer 2

You should look into json_encode/json_decode functions in PHP, those make interacting with Javascript really easy.

With your current serialization format you are just creating headaches for yourself.

Answer 3

I think you can split this string first by '#', then each split result splits by regex to exactly "number>number" so ">>" will not be there, then "number>>number" and so on.
Hope it helps.
Sorry for my english.

Answer 4

What about to serialize (instead of your string 1>2>3>>4#5#6>7) into JSON form like this:

{'1': {'2': {'3': {'4': true}}}, '5': true, '6': {'7': true}}

Then you can unserialize it using json_decode in PHP.

Answer 5

If you really wanted to use that format, something like this would work, but I think JSON would be much better.

<?php

$str = '1>2>3>>4#5#6>7';

preg_match_all('~([^\d]+)?([\d]+)~', $str, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER);

//$current is the nodes from the top to the node we are at currently
$current = array();
$result = array();

foreach ($matches as $item) {
    $id = $item[2];

    if (!$item[1] || $item[1] == '#') {
        $level = 0;   
    } else {
        $level = strlen($item[1]);    
    }

    $tmp = array( 'id' => $id );

    $current[ $level ] = & $tmp;

    if ($level == 0) {
        $result[] = & $tmp;   
    } elseif (isset($current[ $level - 1 ])) {
        $parent = & $current[ $level - 1 ];
        if (!isset($parent['children'])) {
            $parent['children'] = array();   
        }
        $parent['children'][] = & $tmp;
        unset($parent);
    } 

    unset($tmp);
}

print_r($result);