Humbert Redfinch-Northbottom The Third, I Presume? - PHP

You may never have heard of it before - but if your job involvesexchanging data between different servers and applications, you're going tobe hearing a lot about it very soon. Find out how WDDX makes it possible tocreate and transmit platform-neutral data structures across the Web, andhow it can be combined with PHP to create a whole new generation of Webapplications (including new content syndication and financial updateservices).

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By: Vikram Vaswani, (c) Melonfire

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September 13, 2001

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The process of converting a data structure into WDDX is referred to as "serialization". Deserialization is, obviously, the reverse process. And your favourite language and mine, PHP, comes with a number of WDDX functions to accomplish both these (although you may need to recompile your PHP build to enable them.)

The first of these is the wddx_serialize_value() function, used to create a WDDX packet containing a single value. The function also accepts an optional second parameter, which is used to generate a comment for the packet. So the following line of code

<?
echo wddx_serialize_value("Humbert Redfinch-Northbottom The Third", "Who da
man?");
?>

would generate the WDDX fragment

<wddxPacket version='1.0'>
<header><comment>Who da man?</comment></header><data><string>Humbert Redfinch-Northbottom The Third</string></data></wddxPacket>

Once a value has been serialized, it can be reconstituted into its original form with the wddx_deserialize() function, used to convert a WDDX packet into a native data structure. Consider the following example,

<?
// serialize$packet = wddx_serialize_value("Humbert Redfinch-Northbottom The Third");

// deserialize$original_string = wddx_deserialize($packet);

// printecho "My name is $original_string";?>

which generates the output


My name is Humbert Redfinch-Northbottom The Third

This also works with arrays - the following code

<?
$star_wars = array("princess" => "Leia", "teacher" => "Yoda", "new hope" =>"Luke", "bad guy" => "Darth", "worse guy" => "The Emperor");

$packet = wddx_serialize_value($star_wars);

$data = wddx_deserialize($packet);

echo $data['princess'];?>

outputs