perl and php data-structure interoperability

i've been working on a method of handling sessions that would be portable and easy to implement in PHP and Perl. i've got everything working fine except the interoperability of serialized data. the reason it's important is becuase my session table basically looks like this: (i left out the 'timestamp' field, becuase it's not relevant) id name data -- ---- ---- 1 scott serialized array the 'data' field is a TEXT type (in my Mysql DB) that is meant to store a serialized assoc. array. this enables me to easily store and retrieve an arbitrary amount of data about the user. but i havent found any cross-language way of serializing and unserializing data structures. of course, i could roll my own, but before i go to the trouble of writing a whole php-compatible serialize and deserialize module for perl, can anyone offer any help or suggestions on how to make PHP and Perl recognize each other's serialized data?