New on Dynamically Typed today, there's a good sized post attenpting to answer the question "How long is a piece of string?"

That's a question that's been bugging me alot recently. Wondering if anyone's got any idea's how to solve this problem... PHP's serialize() function allows you represent PHP data structures as a string, which can then be parsed and restored to data with unserialize().

Because the string is very easy to generate, it opens up the possibility of using it in other languages to exchange data with PHP [...] In general this approach works nicely - no need to reinvent stuff on PHP's side at least. But there's one problem; how long is a string? As this bug shows, it's a problem.

Mostly, it deals with the issues that international/special characters can cause in the serializing of the data, as well as pulling it back out...