what's the point of serializing arrays to store them in the db?

Question

I see that people store arrays as like:

a:6:{i:0;s:5:\"11148\";i:1;s:5:\"11149\";i:2;s:5:\"11150\";i:3;s:5:\"11153\";i:4;s:5:\"11152\";i:5;s:5:\"11160\";}

Answer 1

there is no mysql type array, and the reason is so you can recreate the array easily, if your data was as you showed it not hard but what about a multidimensional array with non numeric keys. Of course this is NOT good db practice in the first place, breaking normilisation