Regex/ code to fix corrupt serialized PHP data.

Question

I have a massive multidimensional array that has been serialised by PHP. It has been stored in MySQL and the data field wasn't large enough... the end has been cut off... I need to extract the data... unserialize wont work... does anyone know of a code that can close all the arrays... recalculate string lengths... it's too much data to do by hand.

Many thanks.

Answer 1

This is recalculating the length of the elements in a serialized array:

$fixed = preg_replace_callback(
    '/s:([0-9]+):"(.*?)";/',
    function ($matches) { return "s:".strlen($matches[2]).':"'.$matches[2].'";';     },
    $serialized
);

However, it doesn't work if your strings contain ";. In that case it's not possible to fix the serialized array string automatically -- manual editing will be needed.