Skip to Main Content
PHP in a Nutshell
book

PHP in a Nutshell

by Paul Hudson
October 2005
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
372 pages
11h 35m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from PHP in a Nutshell

Storing Complex Data Types

You can use sessions to store complex data types such as objects and arrays simply by treating them as standard variables, as this code shows:

    $myarr["0"] = "Sunday";
    $myarr["1"] = "Monday";
    $myarr["2"] = "Tuesday";
    $myarr["3"] = "Wednesday";
    $myarr["4"] = "Thursday";
    $myarr["5"] = "Friday";
    $myarr["6"] = "Saturday";

    $_SESSION["myarr"] = $myarr;

You can also use the serialize() and unserialize() functions to explicitly convert to and from a string. If you do not call serialize() yourself, PHP will do it for you when the session data is written to disk—many do rely on this, but I would say it's best to be explicit and serialize() data yourself.

If you are trying to store objects in your session and you find it is not restoring the class name properly, it is probably because you started the session before you had the class defined. This problem is often encountered by people who use the session.auto_start directive in php.ini.

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

PHP Cookbook

PHP Cookbook

Eric A. Mann
Programming PHP

Programming PHP

Rasmus Lerdorf, Kevin Tatroe
Learning PHP

Learning PHP

David Sklar

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596100671Errata Page