Hands-On Web Penetration Testing with Metasploit

Understanding serialization

For a basic understanding of the serialize() function, let's take a look at the following PHP code snippet:

In the preceding code, we initialized an array named my_array with the following elements:

• my_array[0] = "Harpreet"
• my_array[1] = "Himanshu"

We then used the serialize() function to generate serialized data for the array. As you can see in the following screenshot, the serialized data stream is as follows:

The other PHP serialized formats that are commonly used are these:

• a: Array
• b: Boolean
• i: Integer