How can i unserialize a string?

Question

I have a menu system that uses a drag and drop tree structure to make it easy for a user to modify. When the javascript serializes the string, it does it in the following way:

// Assume each of these items has an ID on with the respective numbers attached
Menu Item 1
  + Menu Item 2
  + Menu Item 3
     + Menu Item 4
Menu Item 5
Menu Item 6
  + Menu Item 7

This will then get serialized as:

1>2>3>>4#5#6>7

The problem with this is that there could be an arbitrary number of sublevels, which makes it difficult to unserialize. I'm using PHP server side to unserialize it but I am at a loss as to what to do.

Any suggestions welcome, even to the method of serialization, I’ll just hack the code.

Answer 1

You should look into json_encode/json_decode functions in PHP, those make interacting with Javascript really easy.

With your current serialization format you are just creating headaches for yourself.

Answer 2

I think you can split this string first by '#', then each split result splits by regex to exactly "number>number" so ">>" will not be there, then "number>>number" and so on.
Hope it helps.
Sorry for my english.