These functions are intended for work with WDDX.
In order to use WDDX, you will need to install the expat library (which comes with Apache 1.3.7 or higher).
After installing expat compile PHP with --enable-wddx.
The windows version of PHP has built in support for this extension. You do not need to load any additional extension in order to use these functions.
All the functions that serialize variables use the first element of an array to determine whether the array is to be serialized into an array or structure. If the first element has string key, then it is serialized into a structure, otherwise, into an array.
This example will produce:
<wddxPacket version='1.0'><header comment='PHP packet'/><data> <string>PHP to WDDX packet example</string></data></wddxPacket> |
This example will produce:
<wddxPacket version='1.0'><header comment='PHP'/><data><struct> <var name='pi'><number>3.1415926</number></var><var name='cities'> <array length='3'><string>Austin</string><string>Novato</string> <string>Seattle</string></array></var></struct></data></wddxPacket> |
Note: If you want to serialize non-ASCII characters you have to set the appropriate locale before doing so (see setlocale()).