breaking down session contents and customer basket info

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Trying to parse out info that's stored in the customer's basket and sessions (stored in mysql...) and need some help.

Looking at the session text itself, it's obviously tracking alot of info - how is that parsed, and what's the idenity of it's elements?

Also, when looking that the customer basket contents and the info in products_id..

If a customer has item 444 in their cart, you'll see info in their products_id field to the effect of 

444{1}xxx where xxx is some other number.  Whats the number in the curly braces and the number to the right - how are they used?

Any guidance is appreciated....