👀 Views: 488 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-09

php serialization closures PHP

I'm working on a project and hit a roadblock. I'm prototyping a solution and I've spent hours debugging this and I'm sure I'm missing something obvious here, but I'm running into a question when trying to serialize a Closure in PHP 8.1... I have a class that contains a Closure, and when I call `serialize()` on an instance of this class, it throws an behavior. Here’s a simplified version of my code: ```php class MyClass { private $callback; public function __construct(callable $callback) { $this->callback = $callback; } } $myObject = new MyClass(function() { return 'Hello, World!'; }); $serialized = serialize($myObject); ``` When I run this, I get the following behavior: ``` Serialization of 'Closure' is not allowed ``` I read that PHP doesn't allow serialization of Closures due to security and performance reasons, but I need to continue the state of my object, which includes this Closure. I tried using a workaround by saving the callback as a string instead, but that limits me since I want to easily restore it to a Closure afterwards. Here's what I attempted: 1. Storing the Closure as a string and using `create_function()` (deprecated in PHP 7.2), which didn't help because I need to define functions dynamically using this method anymore. 2. Implementing an interface to provide a string representation of my Closure, but I need to restore it back to a Closure. Is there a best practice or a design pattern I can use to work around this limitation while still maintaining the functionality of my class? Are there any libraries or techniques that can guide to achieve this in PHP 8.1? Is there a better approach? My team is using Php for this desktop app. Any examples would be super helpful. Thanks for taking the time to read this!