Wordpress wp_options option question?

Question

Hello Can anyone explain me what this mean :

a:2:{s:8:"scSlider";s:8:"featured";s:8:"npSlider";s:1:"4";}

How should I read these values?Tnx

Answer 1

That looks familiar: it looks like a plugin option. As Pekka suggests, they use serialised arrays to pack multiple variables into a single database entry. (Use unserialize.)

I'm guessing you found it whilst doing something like:

SELECT *
FROM `wp_options`
WHERE 1
LIMIT 0 , 30

Unfortunately, without some idea of which plugin you have installed (I'm guessing it's a slider widget of some sort) it's unlikely that anyone will be able to tell you what the values mean.

Could I also suggest making use of the excellent Wordpress Stackexchange site?

Answer 2

Those are serialized options. When you use add_option() or update_option() with an array or object instead of a scalar value, WordPress serializes the data with serialize() before it puts it in the database. It's incredibly handy when you don't want to have to create a lot of different options in the database to save some values. This way you just put them all into an array and just save the array.

When you retrieve the data with get_option() WordPress will automatically unserialize the data into an array or object as well.