Easy Image Gallery – Retrieve Serialized Data

What you’re seeing is Serialized Data. WordPress does this automagically when trying to save an array or object to the database. The get_post_meta() function will unserialize the data if you pass the right parameters:

$array = get_post_meta(
    $post->ID,              // The post ID you want metadata from
    '_key_name',            // The meta key name
    true                    // Whether to attempt to unserialize or return the raw value.
);

PHP has a built in function to deal with this too such as unserialize(). WordPress also has it’s own function called maybe_unserialize() which will attempt to unserialize the given string.