unserialisation of sessoin variables

hello all, again a question. Since you seem to be able to initialise a session once (not anymore after a destroy), I need a means to deserialize session data. I will explain what I intend to do: - no cookies (as requested by client) - I overload the session_save_handler functions with my own, no probs there - I need another kind of GC than the one provided to eliminate session files distinct from the one called by PHP, which needs to check a session variable (so, not the file_last_access_time or something) - this all to eliminate illegal use of a session by some other user (inside the session are a few keys that need te be validated first before the data can be used ... for this I also need this deserialiser because of the original gc and improper use of a disconeected users' session) - I also need to be able to use this function in a cronjob-php called with the CGI version ofcourse ;-) now, what I need is this: with the read() function in the session_save_handler, I need to be able to load the file associated with the session (which I succeed), but it returns a string like this: --- $count = 255; $foo = "I'm a lousy excuse for a string!"; --- output string is: "count:i:255;foo:s:32:I'm a lousy excuse for a string!" now, how do I get 'count' and 'foo' back out of this string? is there a function that does so (unserialize()?) and how do I implement this to get "255" back in $count (a local var) and "I'm a lousy excuse for a string!" back into $foo? I will be using it to validate (without using session_start() first) and inside this cronjob (which has to validate a variable iso last_file_acces, for variable time_outs) that does some gc (among other things). thnx in advance! -- Hoogachtend, Dimitri Smits, Praeses WINAK 1999-2000 ************************************************************* Winak HomePage: http://www.winak.cx Green HomePage: http://chaos.concepts.nl/~green e-mail: gongo@vt4.net *************************************************************