Hi Lynna, on 5/12/04 7:36 PM, Chris at chris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote: > You could serialize up the data in sessions and then use that data > before adding it to the database. See http://www.php.net/serialize and > http://www.php.net/unserialize and http://www.php.net/session > OK, so if I understand this correctly, the serialize function can take something like a big associative array containing all the data I want to be able to write into the database and condense it into a single object that can be passed via a hidden form field or something to that effect, correct? Or the data can be put into the session array using $_SESSION, and then passed by using a $session_id in the page URL? You won't need to use unserialize and serialize per page if you're going to use sessions - you only need those if you're going to pass the values in a URL or in a hidden form field. For sessions, you can simply $my_array = array('1','2','3','4','5'); $_SESSION['blah'] = $my_array; sort of thing.. > But according to one of the user comments in the manual I have to use > addslashes() and stripslashes() if I want to be able to put the data into the database after unserializing it - is that right? Yep. So you'll need to do $value = addslashes(serialize($real_value)); and use $value in your query... Then when you fetch out $real_value = unserialize(stripslashes($value)); Done =) > Also, what about character encoding? My database and my web pages are utf-8 because of the presence of special characters in some of the artists and names and image and exhibition titles (it's a Canadian gallery, so there are a lot of French artists). Will serializing the array containing the data affect that in any way? Not as far as I know, it should handle that fine. > Sorry if I'm being a pest - the whole session thing is new to me and I want to make sure I understand it correctly. Ask as many questions as you need to, we've all been at the start before =)
