An experienced PHP developer might be wondering why posting this topic in a blog if PHP already has universal and almost transparent tools for this job, specifically serialize and unserialize built-in functions.

The key statement here is “almost transparent” which means you have to include all class definitions before invoking unserialize or use some __autoload schema. Otherwise you are going to face the dreaded “The script tried to execute a method or access a property of an incomplete object” fatal error.

The whole problem is due to the fact a serialized object has no idea about its class definition except the class name(the reason behind that is absolutely valid).

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