Check to see if a string is serialized?

Question

What\'s the best way to determine whether or not a string is the result of the serialize() function?

https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.serialize

Answer 1

Despite Pascal MARTIN's excellent answer, I was curious if you could approach this another way, so I did this just as a mental exercise

';
  echo $valueToUnserialize;
} else {
  echo 'Value was unserialized!
';
  var_dump( $unserialized );
}

And it actually works. The only caveat is that it will likely break if you have a registered error handler because of how $php_errormsg works.