<?php

/**
 * Instead of the time and space consuming textual representation used by PHP's `serialize`,
 * igbinary stores php data structures in a compact binary form.
 * Memory savings are significant when using memcached, APCu, or similar memory based storages for serialized data.
 * The typical reduction in storage requirements are around 50%.
 * The exact percentage depends on your data.
 *
 * But where does the name "igbinary" come from? There was once a similar project
 * called fbinary but it has disappeared from the Internet. Its architecture
 * wasn't very clean either. IG is short name for a finnish social networking site
 * {@link http://irc-galleria.net/ IRC-Galleria}.
 *
 * Storing complex PHP data structures such as arrays of associative arrays
 * with the standard PHP serializer is not very space efficient.
 * Igbinary uses two strategies to minimize the size of the serialized
 * output.
 *
 * 1. Repeated strings are stored only once (this also includes class and property names).
 *    Collections of objects benefit significantly from this.
 *    See the `igbinary.compact_strings` option.
 *
 * 2. Integer values are stored in the smallest primitive data type available:
 *     *123* = `int8_t`,
 *     *1234* = `int16_t`,
 *     *123456* = `int32_t`
 *    ... and so on.
 *
 * This file is igbinary's phpdoc documentation stub.
 *
 * @author Oleg Grenrus <oleg.grenrus@dynamoid.com>
 * @version 1.0.0
 * @package igbinary
 */

namespace {

    /**
     * Generates a storable representation of a value.
     * This is useful for storing or passing PHP values around without losing
     * their type and structure. To make the serialized string into a PHP value
     * again, use {@see igbinary_unserialize}.
     *
     * {@see igbinary_serialize()} handles all types, except the resource-type.
     * You can even {@see serialize()} arrays that contain references to itself.
     * Circular references inside the array/object you are {@see serialize()}
     * will also be stored.
     *
     * If object implements {@link \Serializable} interface, PHP will call the
     * member function serialize to get serialized representation of object.
     *
     * When serializing objects, PHP will attempt to call the member function
     * {@see object::__sleep} prior to serialization. This is to allow the
     * object to do any last minute clean-up, etc. prior to being serialized.
     * Likewise, when the object is restored using {@see unserialize()} the
     * {@see object::__wakeup} member function is called.
     *
     * @param mixed $value The value to be serialized.
     *
     * @return string Returns a string containing a binary representation of
     *                value that can be stored anywhere.
     *
     * @link http://www.php.net/serialize PHP's default serialize
     */
    function igbinary_serialize($value): string {}

    /**
     * Creates a PHP value from a stored representation.
     * {@see igbinary_unserialize()} takes a single serialized variable and
     * converts it back into a PHP value.
     *
     * If the variable being unserialized is an object, then after successfully
     * reconstructing the object, PHP will automatically call the
     * {@see object::__wakeup()} member function (if it exists).
     *
     * If the passed in string could not be unserialized, then {@see NULL} is
     * returned and an {@see \E_WARNING} is issued.
     *
     * @param string $string The serialized string.
     *
     * @return mixed The unserialized value is returned. It can be a boolean,
     *               integer, float, string, array, object or null.
     *
     * @link http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.unserialize.php PHP's default unserialize
     * @link https://secure.php.net/serializable Serializable interface
     */
    function igbinary_unserialize(string $string) {}

}