Parse PHP Session in Javascript

Question

I have recently gone into extending my site using node.js and have come to realisation I need a session handler for my PHP sessions. Now everything was cool and dandy and node.js reads the php sessions and can propogate it's own session with the php ones. I am using database sessions so the session data gets saved into a field in the database.

I have however found a slight problem. I am attempting to read the session data into node.js and it's really quite a strange string. I have been able to get the strucutre of each session variable down to:

'field_name'|'type':'length':'value';

Now on certain strings the value field can be missing on other strings the length can be missing (when a variable is Null). The type can also be more than b, s, i; it can also be N (NULL).

I had originally thought up of a huge translator for JS but this just somehow seems a very wrong way to do it.

Has anyone here tried to extract php session variables in JS before and is there any kind of script that could help? Maybe there is a formatting thing I can use on PHP side to make my life a lot easier in node.js?

Edit: the Schema looks like:

{ _id: { id: 'L:\u00c1\u009d\u008e\u00ad\u000e}<\u0002\u0000\u0000' }
, session_id: 'a2clfnjhopv1srs5k5elgbfjv5'
, user_id: 0
, session_data:     'logged|b:0;uid|i:0;server_key|N;AUTH_TIER2|b:0;email|s:0:"";cheese|s:6:"cheese";'
, active: 1
, expires: 1278920567
}

This is the mongo db record for a user session. The field needing to be translated is session_data. There is some kind of formatting error when pasting it in since stackoverflow wont format that as code when I try and make it for some reason.

I tried to JSONfy the field before but it lost it's types and didn't read Null entries etc so I stopped that

Thanks,

Answer 1

Here is a session_decode function based on the unserialize function of phpjs: https://github.com/vianneyb/phpjs/blob/master/functions/var/session_decode.js

works for me!

Answer 2

I'm relatively sure PHP uses the serialize and unserialize functions to handle session data.

There is a JavaScript implementation of unserialize in PHP.JS, you can find it here: http://phpjs.org/functions/unserialize

Answer 3

Just to reply with the way I've found: force PHP to use JSON instead :

Use the class below, with session_set_save_handler to store data as JSON and let PHP still using his own system. Link this class using this function at the beginning of each script you use session : http://php.net/manual/ru/function.session-set-save-handler.php

PS : here the class use memcache to store JSON resulting object, on Node.JS, use a memcache object, and retrieve like this :

• get the PHPSESSID from cookies
• use that characters string to bring a key from memcached with "sessions/id" where id is the key and session just the string (see class below).

Now you should have only JSON in memcache, so it's becoming a simple game with Node.JS to work with.

PS : of course you can work with/improve this, you can also use this not only with memcache (a db for example)

<?php
/**
 * This class is used to store session data with memcache, it store in json the session to be used more easily in Node.JS
 */
class memcacheSessionHandler{
    private static $lifetime = 0;
    private static $memcache = null;

    public function __construct(){
            self::$memcache = new Memcache();
            self::$memcache->addServer('localhost', 11211);
}

    public function __destruct(){
            session_write_close();
            self::$memcache->close();
            self::$memcache = null;
    }

    public static function open(){
            self::$lifetime = ini_get('session.gc_maxlifetime');
            return true;
    }

    public static function read($id){
            $tmp = $_SESSION;
            $_SESSION = json_decode(self::$memcache->get("sessions/{$id}"), true);
            $new_data = session_encode();
            $_SESSION = $tmp;
            return $new_data;
    }

    public static function write($id, $data){
            $tmp = $_SESSION;
            session_decode($data);
            $new_data = $_SESSION;
            $_SESSION = $tmp;
            return self::$memcache->set("sessions/{$id}", json_encode($new_data), 0, self::$lifetime);
    }

    public static function destroy($id){
            return self::$memcache->delete("sessions/{$id}");
    }

    public static function gc(){
            return true;
    }

    public static function close(){
            return true;
    }
}
?>

Answer 4

I had the same problem. I needed to integrate php with node.js. I used js-php-unserialize to do this. The use is pretty straightforward.

var PHPUnserialize = require('php-unserialize');
console.log(PHPUnserialize.unserializeSession(yourData));

For example if you

var yourData = 'A|s:1:"B";userID|s:24:"53d620475e746b37648b4567";';

you will get this result:

{
  A: 'B',
  userID: '53d620475e746b37648b4567'
}