[wp-hackers] question regarding serialization and unserialization

[Scott Plumlee]

Not particular to Wordpress most likely, but hopefully someone has seen 
this.

Been attempting to get a local copy of a production Wordpress site 
running on a laptop for testing.  Did a database dump, run a perl script 
across it to replace the site name with the local site name, then 
another perl script to adjust some serialized values (the site name goes 
from ABCD.com to ABCD.com:8000, so I'm adjusting the value of the string 
length indicator for those values to be 5 characters longer) and then 
load on the laptop.

Anyone know if adjusting the serialization values in Wordpress this way 
would break the unserialization?

The only thing that is strange is that only ONE particular value (for a 
plugin, it's in the wp_options table) seem to NOT be unserialized 
correctly.  Most of the values seem fine, but this one in particular is 
no longer recognized as an array.

Anyone seen something like this before with Wordpress?  The original 
machine is a FreeBSD server with PHP 4.4.2 and MySQL 4.1.18, the laptop 
is a Mac running PHP 4.4.1 and MySQL 4.1.21. Changelogs for PHP and 
MySQL don't seem to have something particular that would be about this.