A small library that aims to provide a fast way of decoding PHP serialization format. Use it if you need to migrate large amount of PHP data and performance is essential.

The library provides only one function:

>>> import php2json
>>> php2json.php2json(b's:3:"foo";')
b'"foo"'

It's goal is to convert PHP serializer string into JSON string as fast as possible. The assumption is that JSON decoders (such as standard json module or ujson) are much better optimized than phpserialize.

Here's a simple benchmark where I pit phpserialize against php2json combined with ujson and json:

phpserialize: 6.60s
php2json+ujson: 0.15s
php2json+json: 0.19s
speedup (ujson): 4337%
speedup (json): 3485%

Install with:

pip install php2json

Run test with:

pip install tox
make clean
tox .

Run benchmark with:

pip install -r requirements-test.txt
make bench

Few limitations apply:

• only deserialization is possible
• PHP objects are not supported
• behaviour is undefined in presence of unicode strings
• input data must adhere to JSON standards, most notably: array keys must be strings or values easily convertible to strings (such as integers)