js-php-unserialize

JavaScript tool to unserialize data taken from PHP. It can parse "serialize()" output, or even serialized sessions data.

Credits

• The PHP unserializer is taken from kvz's phpjs project.
• The session unserializer's idea is taken from dumpling, which is highly limited by its lack of a real unserializer, and has lot of crash cases.

Installation

Node.js

Install from npm :

npm install php-unserialize

The use it the usual way :

var PHPUnserialize = require('php-unserialize');

console.log(PHPUnserialize.unserialize('a:0:{}')); // {}

Browser

Download tarball from github and then unarchive this where you want, then you can simply include it in your page :

<script src="/path/to/php-unserialize.js"></script>
<script>
  console.log(PHPUnserialize.unserialize('a:0:{}')); // {}
</script>

Compatibility issues

This library has been tested server-side only. For example it uses [].reduce, so it may not work on some browsers. Do not hesitate to make pull requests to fix it for you favorite browsers :)

Notes

• Note that array() will be converted to {} and not []. That can be discussed as array() in PHP has various significations. A choice had to be done, but it may change in the future (cf. next point).
• A less obvious conversion is array('a', 'b') which will be converted to {"0": "a", "1": "b"}. Quite annoying, and it will be fixed if necessary (this means I won't work on this issue unless you really need it, but I agree this is not normal behavior).

Usage

The module exposes two methods:

unserialize(string)

Unserialize output taken from PHP's serialize() method.

It currently does not suport objects.

unserializeSession(string)

Unserialize PHP serialized session. PHP uses a weird custom format to serialize session data, something like "$key1$serializedData1|$key2$serializedData2|…", this methods will parse this and unserialize chunks so you can have a simple anonymous objects.