Wayne May

PHP offers a way to store arrays and objects through serialization. The problem is, there is no actual PHP function the check if data is serialized. I came up with a dirty little function to help with that:

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    function is_serial($data)
    {
        return (@unserialize($data) !== false);
    }

unserialize will return FALSE if you pass a value that is not serialized, BUT, it will also throw an E_NOTICE error at the same time. To get around that, I add the suppressor (@) and then I attempt to unserialize the data.