Serialize question

I’m doing some serializing in my model and the table fields are setup as
“text” types,
yet the output looks sort of strange -

Category ID — - “2” - “6” - “8” - “” - “” State ID — - “3” - “6” -
“7”

  • “9” - “10” Term ID — - “3” - “8” - “2” - “7” - “”
    Looks weird or no ? Is all I need maybe is some regex to strip the
    hyphens
    and do some nice formatting ?
    I’m also going to be passing these values into a query so would clean up
    be
    necessary then as well ?

TIA
Stuart