These functions are intended for work with WDDX.
In order to use WDDX, you will need to install the expat library (which comes with apache 1.3.7 or higher) and recompile PHP with --with-xml and --enable-wddx.
Note: If you want to serialize non-ASCII characters you have to set the appropriate locale before doing so (see setlocale()).
All the functions that serialize variables use the first element of an array to determine whether the array is to be serialized into an array or structure. If the first element has string key, then it is serialized into a structure, otherwise, into an array.
This example will produce:
<wddxPacket version='1.0'><header comment='PHP packet'/><data> <string>PHP to WDDX packet example</string></data></wddxPacket> |
This example will produce: