Parsing serialized Array (Wordpress)

Question

I'm using wordpress and one of my meta key values is stored like this:

a:1:{i:0;s:8:"Religion";}

I'm trying to figure out the easiest way in PHP to parse this so I can extract "Religion" or really any of the elements in a clean manner.

Hope this makes sense - thanks!!!

Loren

Answer 1

that is a serialized array, use unserialize()

$array = unserialize('a:1:{i:0;s:8:"Religion";}');
echo $array[0];

Answer 2

This works in PHP 5.2 and above:

list($thatWord) = unserialize($metaKeyValue);

You then have the string "Religion" in $thatWord.

The string you have:

a:1:{i:0;s:8:"Religion";}

Is a serialized array. If you retrieve it from within wordpress, you would get an Array instead of a string. I assume you pull it from the database directly, so you need to unserialize^Docs it your own.