Please try using this CVS snapshot:

  http://snaps.php.net/php4-STABLE-latest.tar.gz
 
For Windows:
 
  http://snaps.php.net/win32/php4-win32-STABLE-latest.zip

The problem doesn't have to do anything with serialize/unserialize but with the way you store/load the serialized data. Can you tell us how? And do you do any manual changes to the serialized data or even view it with an external editor?

This is the code to save and restore the data:

function download($url, $local){
  $resp = fetchHTTP($url);
	$writefile = @fopen($local, "wb");
	if(!$writefile) return false;
	if(!fwrite($writefile, $resp[data], strlen($resp[data]))) return false;
	fclose($writefile);
	return true;
}

function getHTTPcache($url){
  $cfile='../videodb/cache/imdb/'.md5($url);
    $resp = unserialize(join('',file($cfile)));
    return $resp;
}

Have not tried the snapshot yet- is it supposed to fix (un)serialize or load/store?

Andi

I'm sorry. The function where the file is written is obviously not download, but this one:

function saveHTTPcache($url,$resp){
  $cfile='cache/imdb/'.md5($url);
  $string=serialize($resp);
  @fwrite(@fopen("$cfile", "w"),$string,strlen($string));
}

The filereading hint was a good suggestion- it does actually seem to work if I'm using file_get_contents instead of join('',file($file))-
could smdb. explain why?

Kindly,
Andi

Thank you for taking the time to write to us, but this is not
a bug. Please double-check the documentation available at
http://www.php.net/manual/ and the instructions on how to report
a bug at http://bugs.php.net/how-to-report.php

The way you save and load the data must match. Windows does line termination translation (e.g. \n -> \r\n). To avoid this you must write and read using open mode 'wb'.