Notice: unserialize(): Error at offset

I was developing functionality in RecipePress WordPress theme of ours being sold on ThemeForest where I needed to save some recipes in cookies for users who are not logged in to the site. I came across this error where unserializing the saved $_COOKIE threw the following notice and returned false as bool value.

Notice: unserialize(): Error at offset 0 of 52 bytes

After googling it a lot, I found a solution which is to encode the serialized code using “base64_encode()” and then decode it using “base64_decode()” before unserializing it. The final result is given below.

The process of saving a serialized $_COOKIE

$safe_serialize = base64_encode( serialize( $inspiry_saved_recipes) );

if ( setcookie( 'inspiry_saved_recipes', $safe_serialize, time() + ( 60 * 60 * 24 * 30 ), '/' ) ) {
    esc_html_e( 'Recipe Saved', 'inspiry-recipe-press' );
}

The process of unserializing it back

if ( isset( $_COOKIE[ 'inspiry_saved_recipes' ] ) ) {
   $saved_recipes = $_COOKIE[ 'inspiry_saved_recipes' ];
   $saved_recipes = unserialize(base64_decode($saved_recipes));
   var_dump($saved_recipes);
}

It is necessary to give credit to the link which helped me in this regard. It was from the Magento forums and the link is given below.

https://magento.stackexchange.com/questions/247966/notice-unserialize-error-at-offset-0-of-94-bytes-magento-2-2-5-when-update-w