note 48123 deleted from function.serialize by aharvey

Note Submitter: richard dot prangnell at ntlworld dot com ---- Although the serialise function has its proper uses, it is a relatively slow process. I try to avoid using it wherever possible in the interests of performance. You can store text records in a database as plain text even when it contains PHP variables. The variable values are lost, naturally; but if they can easily be re-attached to retrieved records, zillions of clock cycles can be saved simply by using the str_replace() function: if($convert) { $mainContent = str_replace('$fixPath', $fixPath, $mainContent); $mainContent = str_replace('$theme', $theme, $mainContent); } The above snippet is used in a CMS project. $fixPath contains something like '.' or '..' to prepend relative paths (allowing the record to be used by scripts located in different parts of the directory hierarchy) and $theme inserts the name of the users custom page rendering scheme, which obviously would be undefined at record storage time anyway.