Title: Characters in WordPress database?
Last modified: May 15, 2018

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# Characters in WordPress database?

 *  [jwiere03](https://wordpress.org/support/users/jwiere03/)
 * (@jwiere03)
 * [7 years, 11 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/characters-in-wordpress-database/)
 * I often have to deactivate all of the plugins when I am troubleshooting a site
   that I can’t get logged into. I usually do this with ftp, but I have read you
   can do it by editing the “active_plugins” field in wp_options. When I view this
   field I see characters such as `a:8:{i:0;s:31` what do these represent? I have
   been told it is something MySQL related that refers to data types and their size,
   but I would like more info.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)

 *  Moderator [Steven Stern (sterndata)](https://wordpress.org/support/users/sterndata/)
 * (@sterndata)
 * Volunteer Forum Moderator
 * [7 years, 11 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/characters-in-wordpress-database/#post-10283734)
 * That’s serialized data
 * [http://php.net/manual/en/function.serialize.php#66147](http://php.net/manual/en/function.serialize.php#66147)

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)

The topic ‘Characters in WordPress database?’ is closed to new replies.

## Tags

 * [characters](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/characters/)
 * [database](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/database/)
 * [MySQL](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/mysql/)

 * In: [Fixing WordPress](https://wordpress.org/support/forum/how-to-and-troubleshooting/)
 * 1 reply
 * 2 participants
 * Last reply from: [Steven Stern (sterndata)](https://wordpress.org/support/users/sterndata/)
 * Last activity: [7 years, 11 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/characters-in-wordpress-database/#post-10283734)
 * Status: not resolved

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