Classes and functions involved in serialization and unserialization

Question

I want to know all the classes and functions(individual .php files) in a wordpress installation that handle serialization and unserialization.

Answer 1

WordPress uses maybe_serialize() and maybe_unserialize(). Both of them use PHP's native serialize() and unserialize() functions. See:

http://phpxref.ftwr.co.uk/wordpress/wp-includes/functions.php.source.html#l1028

http://phpxref.ftwr.co.uk/wordpress/wp-includes/functions.php.source.html#l222

Both of those functions make use of the function is_serialized(), which checks if the variable is serialized yet. See:

http://phpxref.ftwr.co.uk/wordpress/wp-includes/functions.php.source.html#l222