A practical guide to everyday developer utilities for encoding, hashing, JSON, URLs, and data conversion.
Understand PHP serialization, when serialized data is useful, and why untrusted serialized input requires special care.
A practical guide to valid JSON syntax, formatting, validation, common errors, and safer API debugging workflows.
Learn why URLs use percent encoding, which characters need encoding, and how to avoid broken query strings in web applications.
Learn what Base64 is, why it is useful for transporting binary data, and why Base64 is encoding rather than encryption.
Learn what MD5 does, where it can still be useful for checksums, and why it should not be used for passwords or modern security-sensitive hashing.
Understand why passwords should be hashed with a password-specific algorithm such as bcrypt instead of encrypted and later decrypted.
