Re: Fix for bug #63437

On Sat, 09 Mar 2013 21:36:41 +0100, Derick Rethans <derick@php.net> wrote:

On Tue, 5 Mar 2013, Anatol Belski wrote:

I've reworked the patch from http://nebm.ist.utl.pt/~glopes/misc/date_period_interval_ser.diff (mentioned by tony2001) for bug #63437, that seems to fix the issue. That patch was ported back to 5.3 and adapted to the current 5.4+. Both variants are posted to the ticket.

Serializing this as a base64 encoded variant of some binary data is not a good thing. If you want to serialize, it needs to output the same thigns that allow users to create the period or interval.

I would agree in principle, but, as I explained before, there is a problem. The DatePeriod class has 64-bit integers in its internal structure. The PHP integer type cannot (in general) represent that data. So the general method of getting the object data via get_properties and serializing (and then using __set_state to convert the array back) does not work unless you represent those 64-bit integers with some non-integer type and do the conversions.

I also don't think this would work for Big Endian vs Little Endian either.

It does; the integers are converted to network order before being stored, so you can share the serialized data between machines with different endianness. -- Gustavo Lopes