VarExporter Component

The VarExporter component allows exporting any serializable PHP data structure to plain PHP code. While doing so, it preserves all the semantics associated with the serialization mechanism of PHP (__wakeup, __sleep, Serializable, __serialize, __unserialize).

It also provides an instantiator that allows creating and populating objects without calling their constructor nor any other methods.

The reason to use this component vs serialize() or igbinary is performance: thanks to OPcache, the resulting code is significantly faster and more memory efficient than using unserialize() or igbinary_unserialize().

Unlike var_export(), this works on any serializable PHP value.

It also provides a few improvements over var_export()/serialize():

• the output is PSR-2 compatible;
• the output can be re-indented without messing up with \r or \n in the data
• missing classes throw a ClassNotFoundException instead of being unserialized to PHP_Incomplete_Class objects;
• references involving SplObjectStorage, ArrayObject or ArrayIterator instances are preserved;
• Reflection*, IteratorIterator and RecursiveIteratorIterator classes throw an exception when being serialized (their unserialized version is broken anyway, see https://bugs.php.net/76737).

Resources

• Documentation
• Contributing
• Report issues and send Pull Requests in the main Symfony repository