Is this a known format for persisting an object?

Question

I am analysing a system that persists HTML form input data like this:

a:2:{s:4:"form";a:1:{s:10:"labelWidth";i:150;}s:6:"fields";a:4:{s:15:"disp ...

Does anybody know if this is a known, documented format? Looks a bit like JSON.

Answer 1

It is the output of PHP's serialize() function. JSON's output looks quite different.

In PHP, you can decode the data by using unserialize().

In what language do you need to process that bit of data? Maybe I know of an implementation for it.