[Tickets #9263] Problems with serialized arrays stored in a MySQL DB

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Ticket URL: http://bugs.horde.org/ticket/9263
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  Ticket             | 9263
  Created By         | steffen.hau at rz.uni-mannheim.de
  Summary            | Problems with serialized arrays stored in a MySQL DB
  Queue              | Horde Base
  Version            | 3.3.8
  Type               | Bug
  State              | Unconfirmed
  Priority           | 1. Low
  Milestone          |
  Patch              |
  Owners             |
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steffen.hau at rz.uni-mannheim.de (2010-09-20 12:24) wrote:

Our production horde system is running with PHP 5.2.13 with MySQL  
5.0.67 (OpenSUSE 11.1). The development system has PHP 5.3.3 and the  
MySQL on the DB server is 5.1.46 (both OpenSUSE 11.3). I've created a  
utf8 dumpfile of the old database with phpmyadmin, changed the CHARSET  
to utf8 and imported it on the new DB server.

If I now login to the development horde, the identities aren't  
displayed at all. The reason for this is the php unserialize function,  
which reports an error at offset... It complains about the string  
length of "Standardidentität", which was previously 17 and now with  
utf8 it is 18. In the manual of unserialize at php.net  
(http://www.php.net/manual/de/function.unserialize.php#75773) there  
are a couple of comments for this issue and I was able to fix to the  
wrong string length for the utf8 thing with php's preg_replace function.

But the identities are still not displayed for those users, which have  
a signature or some alias adresses, e.g. configured. There are several  
occurrences of "\r\n" in my dumpfilere. If I apply my preg_replace  
function on a serialized array returned by MySQL, the result differs  
from applying the function to the accordant line on my dumpfile. E.g.  
the strlen functions reports a string length of 495 for my signature  
fetched from the database, but according to my dumpfile, the string  
length of my signature is 527. This results again in an error at  
offset.. reported by unserialize.

Is there any documented way on how I could first migrate the db from  
latin1 to utf8 as well as having all these serialized arrays beeing  
transformed, so that they are still usable?