Sometimes the serialized values in the database gets corrupted because of special characters present in the serialized data. The below function helps to fix those serialization problems

function mbUnserialize($string)
{
    try {
        $result = unserialize($string);
    } catch (\Exception $ex) {
        $string2 = preg_replace_callback(
            '!s:(\d+):"(.*?)";!s',
            function ($m) {
                $len = strlen($m[2]);
                $result = "s:$len:\"{$m[2]}\";";
                return $result;
            },
            $string
        );
        $result =  unserialize($string2);
    }

    return $result;
}

 

function mbFixSerialize($string)
{
    try {
        $goodString = unserialize($string);
    } catch (\Exception $exception) {
        $goodString = false;
    }


    if ( $goodString !== true &&  preg_match('/^[aOs]:/', $string) ) {
        $string = preg_replace_callback( '/s\:(\d+)\:\"(.*?)\";/s',    function($matches){return 's:'.strlen($matches[2]).':"'.$matches[2].'";'; },   $string );
    }
    return $string;
}