What is the purpose of serializing data in PHP and how can it be properly retrieved and displayed from a database?

Serializing data in PHP is useful for storing complex data structures (arrays, objects) in a single string format that can be easily stored in a database or transferred between different systems. To properly retrieve and display serialized data from a database, you need to fetch the serialized string, unserialize it back into its original data structure, and then display the data as needed. 

// Retrieve serialized data from the database
$serializedData = $row['serialized_data'];

// Unserialize the data
$unserializedData = unserialize($serializedData);

// Display the data
foreach ($unserializedData as $key => $value) {
    echo $key . ': ' . $value . '<br>';
}

Keywords

Serialization PHP data retrieval database display

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