Mastering PHP 7

Using __sleep()

Object serialization is another important aspect of OOP. PHP provides a serialize() function that allows us to serialize a value passed to it. The result is a string containing a byte-stream representation of any value that can be stored in PHP. Serializing the scalar data types and simple objects is pretty straightforward, as per the following example:

<?php$age = 34;$name = 'John';$obj = new stdClass();$obj->age = 34;$obj->name = 'John';var_dump(serialize($age));var_dump(serialize($name));var_dump(serialize($obj));

The resulting output is shown as follows:

string(5) "i:34;"string(11) "s:4:"John";"string(56) "O:8:"stdClass":2:{s:3:"age";i:34;s:4:"name";s:4:"John";}"

Even a simple custom class can be easily :

<?phpclass ...