I’ve been coding PHP for a few years now, but still once in a while I come across something that I had no idea about. \u00a0In a recent project I was working on the single sign on (SSO) integration with the customer’s internal systems. \u00a0After doing the initial proof of concept code snippet, I got the logged in user results from a shared caching server. \u00a0The string looked something like this:<\/p>\n
\r\nUserAuth|a:2:{s:8:"username";s:6:"leonid";s:4:"role";s:5:"admin";}UserSettings|a:2:{s:8:"language";s:2:"en";s:8:"timezone";s:5:"GMT+2";}\r\n<\/pre>\nThis\u00a0was very similar to the results of PHP’s serialize()<\/a> function, but not quite. \u00a0I’ve asked around, but nobody could point me in the right direction, so I went the regular expression way to parse this (do I have two problems<\/a> now?).<\/p>\nAfter a code review and discussion with the developers on the customer side, I’ve learned that this is apparently a result of PHP’s session_encode()<\/a> function, which I haven’t seen in the wild until that day. \u00a0Excellent! Now I should be able to use session_decode()<\/a> to parse that, right? \u00a0Well, almost. \u00a0According to PHP Sadness #29<\/a>:<\/p>\nThe only way to decode php-session-format serialization (different from normal php<\/span> serialize<\/a>) is by calling php<\/span> session_decode<\/a>, which can only be called if there is an active session. If there is no active session, you can’t decode session data without starting one first.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nSo, don’t forget to session_start()<\/a> before you try to decode. \u00a0Which makes it a bit tricky if you already have a session that you don’t want to ruin. \u00a0You might want to look into session_name()<\/a> to work around it. \u00a0Gladly, I didn’t have to resolve to that as another customer-specific work around was implemented.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\nI’ve been coding PHP for a few years now, but still once in a while I come across something that I had no idea about. \u00a0In a recent project I was working on the single sign on (SSO) integration with the customer’s internal systems. \u00a0After doing the initial proof of concept code snippet, I got … Continue reading PHP session encoding<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"PHP session encoding #WebDev #PHP","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1,18,62,1334],"tags":[38,1330],"keyring_services":[],"class_list":["post-24513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-programming","category-technology","category-web-work","tag-php","tag-web-development"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t