Parse PHP Session in Javascript

Question

I have recently gone into extending my site using node.js and have come to realisation I need a session handler for my PHP sessions. Now everything was cool and dandy and node.js reads the php sessions and can propogate it's own session with the php ones. I am using database sessions so the session data gets saved into a field in the database.

I have however found a slight problem. I am attempting to read the session data into node.js and it's really quite a strange string. I have been able to get the strucutre of each session variable down to:

'field_name'|'type':'length':'value';

Now on certain strings the value field can be missing on other strings the length can be missing (when a variable is Null). The type can also be more than b, s, i; it can also be N (NULL).

I had originally thought up of a huge translator for JS but this just somehow seems a very wrong way to do it.

Has anyone here tried to extract php session variables in JS before and is there any kind of script that could help? Maybe there is a formatting thing I can use on PHP side to make my life a lot easier in node.js?

Edit: the Schema looks like:

{ _id: { id: 'L:\u00c1\u009d\u008e\u00ad\u000e}<\u0002\u0000\u0000' }
, session_id: 'a2clfnjhopv1srs5k5elgbfjv5'
, user_id: 0
, session_data:     'logged|b:0;uid|i:0;server_key|N;AUTH_TIER2|b:0;email|s:0:"";cheese|s:6:"cheese";'
, active: 1
, expires: 1278920567
}

This is the mongo db record for a user session. The field needing to be translated is session_data. There is some kind of formatting error when pasting it in since stackoverflow wont format that as code when I try and make it for some reason.

I tried to JSONfy the field before but it lost it's types and didn't read Null entries etc so I stopped that

Thanks,

Answer 1

I'm relatively sure PHP uses the serialize and unserialize functions to handle session data.

There is a JavaScript implementation of unserialize in PHP.JS, you can find it here: http://phpjs.org/functions/unserialize

Answer 2

Here is a session_decode function based on the unserialize function of phpjs: https://github.com/vianneyb/phpjs/blob/master/functions/var/session_decode.js

works for me!