WPDB query – decrypting DB data

Question

It’s just serialized, in WordPress, you can run maybe_unserialize and get back the variable/array.

$crosssells = $wpdb->get_results(
    "SELECT * 
  FROM $wpdb->postmeta
  WHERE _crosssell_ids <> '' 
 "
);

$array = maybe_unserialize($crosssells);

However, there are built in functions to retrieve posts based on meta information. You can use get_posts to retrieve the posts and get_post_meta to retrieve meta information from a specific post id. It’s best to abstract away from direct database interaction to take advantage of the built in caching, security, etc of WordPress.