PHP unserialize fails with non-encoded characters?

Question

$ser = \'a:2:{i:0;s:5:\"héllö\";i:1;s:5:\"wörld\";}\'; // fails
$ser2 = \'a:2:{i:0;s:5:\"hello\";i:1;s:5:\"world\";}\'; // works
$out = unserialize($ser);
$out2 = un         


        

Answer 1

One more slight variation here which will hopefully help someone ... I was serializing an array then writing it to a database. On retrieving the data the unserialize operation was failing.

It turns out that the database longtext field I was writing into was using latin1 not UTF8. When I switched it round everything worked as planned.

Thanks to all above who mentioned character encoding and got me on the right track!

Answer 2

I know this was posted like one year ago, but I just have this issue and come across this, and in fact I found a solution for it. This piece of code works like charm!

The idea behind is easy. It's just helping you by recalculating the length of the multibyte strings as posted by @Alix above.

A few modifications should suits your code:

/**
 * Mulit-byte Unserialize
 *
 * UTF-8 will screw up a serialized string
 *
 * @access private
 * @param string
 * @return string
 */
function mb_unserialize($string) {
    $string = preg_replace('!s:(\d+):"(.*?)";!se', "'s:'.strlen('$2').':\"$2\";'", $string);
    return unserialize($string);
}

Source: http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/6592

Tested on my machine, and it works like charm!!