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.