jaggy
answered Apr 26 '23 00:00
If you're encountering sub-standard characters while unserializing data in PHP, it's likely due to an encoding issue. PHP uses the default system encoding when serializing and unserializing data, so if your data was serialized in a different encoding or contains special characters that aren't valid in the default encoding, you may run into issues.
To fix this, you can try specifying the encoding when serializing and unserializing data using the serialize() and unserialize() functions. For example, you can serialize data with a specific encoding like this:
$data = array('name' => 'John Doe', 'age' => 30);
$serialized_data = mb_convert_encoding(serialize($data), 'UTF-8');
Then, when you unserialize the data, you can specify the encoding like this:
$unserialized_data = unserialize(mb_convert_encoding($serialized_data, 'UTF-8'));
This ensures that the data is serialized and unserialized with the same encoding, which should prevent any issues with special characters or sub-standard characters