With the announcement of the new Yahoo! PHP Development Center, there's been a lot of buzz around the PHP community, including this new post from Harry Fuecks over on the SitePoint PHP Blog today.

Via John Cox, Yahoo! have opened up a PHP Development Center for their search APIs and, more interestingly, have started exposing their search data as serialized PHP strings. That's "serialized" as in the serialize function.

This is very cool but think a little caution is needed when using it, given that it wasn't designed to be a wire format but rather for local storage of PHP data, within a trusted environment.

In the rest of the post he looks at a few different topics - whether it's inherently safe to use, a quick look at chatacter encoding, and an example of how to use the service with the PEAR::HTTP_Request package.