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Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2024 17:09:06 -0500
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To: Jim Winstead <jimw@trainedmonkey.com>
Cc: PHP Internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Why are serialized strings wrapped in double quotes? (s:<len>:"<string>")
From: figureonecpr@gmail.com (Sanford Whiteman)

Nice work, Jim.

>I enjoy spelunking in the history of the project, so I did some digging. I=
t
>looks to me like Kris didn't quite get the history correct. Boris did prop=
ose
>a form of serialization first, but it looks like what became serialize() a=
nd
>unserialize() came into the project another way.
>
>https://marc.info/?l=3Dphp-general&m=3D90222513234434&w=3D2
>
>The serialize() and unserialize() functions were first added in PHP 3.0.5
>with that same encoding for strings that you're asking about. Here is the
>original proposal for adding the functions from Jani Lehtim=C3=A4ki:
>
>https://news-web.php.net/php.dev/1444
>
>The were originally conceived as var_save() and var_load() and operated on
>files, but you can see the file format uses the same string encoding, alth=
ough it used single quotes.
>
>It was committed to CVS by Stig here, but unfortunately the emails to the =
list didn't include newly-added files.
>
>https://news-web.php.net/php.dev/1540

Huh. So the quotes may have just stuck around from eval()-related approache=
s
without being officially discussed. In the grand scheme even if you're wast=
ing 2
bytes for every string that could be a tiny % on average.

The format's fascinating because it unmistakably *works*, and binary
igbinary/msgpack aside, it's a pretty good byte-stream encoding. If you tak=
e
Sergey's results it's way faster than JSON, at least when it's PHP doing th=
e
unserialization:
https://grechin.org/2021/04/06/php-json-encode-vs-serialize-performance-com=
parison.html

=E2=80=94 S.