Regex/ code to fix corrupt serialized PHP data.

Question

I have a massive multidimensional array that has been serialised by PHP. It has been stored in MySQL and the data field wasn\'t large enough... the end has been cut off... I

Answer 1

I have tried everything found in this post and nothing worked for me. After hours of pain here's what I found in the deep pages of google and finally worked:

function fix_str_length($matches) {
    $string = $matches[2];
    $right_length = strlen($string); // yes, strlen even for UTF-8 characters, PHP wants the mem size, not the char count
    return 's:' . $right_length . ':"' . $string . '";';
}
function fix_serialized($string) {
    // securities
    if ( !preg_match('/^[aOs]:/', $string) ) return $string;
    if ( @unserialize($string) !== false ) return $string;
    $string = preg_replace("%\n%", "", $string);
    // doublequote exploding
    $data = preg_replace('%";%', "µµµ", $string);
    $tab = explode("µµµ", $data);
    $new_data = '';
    foreach ($tab as $line) {
        $new_data .= preg_replace_callback('%\bs:(\d+):"(.*)%', 'fix_str_length', $line);
    }
    return $new_data;
}

You call the routine as follows:

//Let's consider we store the serialization inside a txt file
$corruptedSerialization = file_get_contents('corruptedSerialization.txt');

//Try to unserialize original string
$unSerialized = unserialize($corruptedSerialization);

//In case of failure let's try to repair it
if(!$unSerialized){
    $repairedSerialization = fix_serialized($corruptedSerialization);
    $unSerialized = unserialize($repairedSerialization);
}

//Keep your fingers crossed
var_dump($unSerialized);