What potential pitfalls should be considered when using LIKE to filter serialized arrays in PHP?

When using LIKE to filter serialized arrays in PHP, it's important to remember that serialized data may contain special characters that could interfere with the LIKE comparison. To avoid potential pitfalls, it's recommended to unserialize the data first, then perform the filtering operation on the unserialized array. 

// Serialized array
$serializedArray = 'a:2:{i:0;s:5:"apple";i:1;s:6:"banana";}';

// Unserialize the data
$array = unserialize($serializedArray);

// Filter the array using LIKE
$filteredArray = array_filter($array, function($item) {
    return strpos($item, 'ban') !== false;
});

// Output the filtered array
print_r($filteredArray);

Keywords

LIKE serialized arrays filtering PHP pitfalls

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