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phred / unserialize.php
Created September 7, 2011 19:04
Simple reliable and non-regex method to unserialize PHP session data
//
// This is the result of about an hour's delving into PHP's hairy-ass serialization internals.
// PHP provides a session_decode function, however, it's only useful for setting the contents of
// $_SESSION. Say, for instance, you want to decode the session strings that PHP stores in its
// session files -- session_decode gets you nowhere.
//
// There are a bunch of nasty little solutions on the manual page[1] that use pretty hairy regular
// expressions to get the job done, but I found a simple way to use PHP's unserialize and recurse
// through the string extracting all of the serialized bits along the way.
//