seldaek / ser-pretty

Pretty print serialized PHP data

ser-pretty

ser-pretty allows you to pretty print serialized PHP data without unserializing it. Therefore, you do not need to have the classes of serialized objects loaded.

$ src/bin/ser-pretty < test.txt 
  class stdClass (1) {
    private $bar =>
    int(223)
  }

But, why?

It happens often that you have serialized PHP data lying around for example from caching, session data or transmitting it through a queue. If you want to inspect this data for debugging purposes, you typically write a tiny script that loads your classes (for de-serialization of objects), fetch the data and display a var dump.

ser-pretty deprecates this step by simply rendering a var_dump() like outut from serialized data, without actually unserializing it.

The CLI

ser-pretty comes with a very simple PHP CLI script, that reads serialized data from STDIN and prints the formatted output to STDOUT. Just call:

$ ser-pretty < dumped_data.txt

You can also pipe serialized data from another script to it.

The Lib

You can also use ser-pretty as a library to integrate pretty printing of serialized PHP data into your debugging/monitoring/… tools. Just look into the CLI script to see what it does.

• The Parser parses serialized into a very simple AST
• A Writer turns an AST into a string representation

ser-pretty ships with a var_dump() style writer, the SimpleTextWriter which you can use out of the box.

Installation

Just include ser-pretty in your project via composer using qafoo/ser-pretty.