serialize problem in php

Question

I want to serialize a multidimension array in php:

$arr['foo'] = array('bar'=>'foo');

I'm going to pass $arr to an eval function and so i needed it to be serialized. When eval runs, it actually passes this as an argument to a class method, call it helper method, this helper method then takes that argument and converts it back to a real array the problem is when i report $arr['foo']['bar'] i get :

Fatal error: Cannot use string offset as an array in...

and when i access it by: $arr[0] i get :

a

apparently the letter a in the string "array".. so when i return print_r($arr) i get :

array

I get no problem with simple one-dimensional arrays since serializing $vehicle['foo'] would let me do return $vehicle['foo'] very well.

Answer 1

If you're using serialize, you need to use unserialize to turn the string back into an array. If you need to be able to eval the result, you can use var_export:

Outputs or returns a parsable string representation of a variable