On Thu, 26 Sep 2002, Jimmy wrote:
> For example:
>
> $string = "1";
> wddx_serialize($string, WDDX_INTEGER);
> // var $string will be encoded as integer, instead of string
>
> $file_name = "contain some unicode char";
> wddx_serialize($file_name, WDDX_BINARY);
> // var $file_name will be encoded as binary, instead of string
>
>
> Two good reasons why this should be implemented:
>
> 1. The main purpose of WDDX is to exchange data between diff lang, and
> auto-detecting var type will break this purpose. Moreover, the
> type-juggling in PHP will make the case worst.
>
> For example, consider these two data:
>
> array ("2" => "Two", "4" => "Four", "5" => "Five");
> array ("0" => "Zero", "1" => "One", "2" => "Two");
>
> The first one will be interpreted by WDDX as hash (assoc array).
> But the second one, where the key happen to be a sequence
> starting from 0, will be interpreted as normal array, not hash.
>
> 2. If users can specify the type of a variable, then PHP's WDDX can support
> all type which is defined in WDDX standard.
> For example binary type. Currently there's no way to create a
> WDDX packet with binary type, because PHP don't have binary type
> variable. There's a workaround to manually base64 the var, but this
> will require a change at the other end to handle this workaround
> too, which in some cases is not possible.
I think it's a good idea. The only problem I see is making it work with
all three serialization functions. wddx_serialize_value() is fine, but
wddx_serialize_vars() and wddx_add_vars() take variable number of
arguments, so it's not clear how it would work in those cases.
-Andrei http://www.gravitonic.com/
* Change is the only constant. *
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