setcookieSend a cookieDescriptionbooleansetcookiestringnamestringvalueintexpirestringpathstringdomainintsecuresetcookie defines a cookie to be sent along
with the rest of the HTTP headers. Like other headers, cookies
must be sent before any output from your
script (this is a protocol restriction). This requires that you
place calls to this function prior to any output, including
<html> and <head> tags
as well as any whitespace. If output exists prior to calling this
function, setcookie will fail and return &false;.
If setcookie successfully runs, it will return
&true;. This does not indicate whether the user accepted the cookie.
All the arguments except the name argument
are optional. If only the name argument is present, the cookie
by that name will be deleted from the remote client. You may
also replace any argument with an empty string
("") in order to skip that
argument. The expire and
secure arguments are integers and cannot
be skipped with an empty string. Use a zero
(0) instead. The
expire argument is a regular Unix time
integer as returned by the time or
mktime functions. The
secure indicates that the cookie should
only be transmitted over a secure HTTPS connection.
Once the cookies have been set, they can be accessed on the next page load
with the $_COOKIE or
$HTTP_COOKIE_VARS arrays. Note,
autoglobals
such as $_COOKIE became available in PHP
4.1.0.
$HTTP_COOKIE_VARS has existed since PHP 3.
Common Pitfalls:
Cookies will not become visible until the next loading of a page that
the cookie should be visible for. To test if a cookie was successfully
set, check for the cookie on a next loading page before the cookie
expires. Expire time is set via the expire
parameter.
Cookies must be deleted with the same parameters as they were set with.
Cookies names can be set as array names and will be available to your
PHP scripts as arrays but seperate cookies are stored on the users
system. Consider explode or
serialize to set one cookie with multiple names
and values.
In PHP 3, multiple calls to setcookie in the same
script will be performed in reverse order. If you are trying to
delete one cookie before inserting another you should put the
insert before the delete. In PHP 4, multiple calls to
setcookie are performed in the order called.
Some examples follow how to send cookies:
<function>setcookie</function> send examples
When deleting a cookie you should assure that the expiration date
is in the past, to trigger the removal mechanism in your browser.
Examples follow how to delete cookies sent in previous example:
<function>setcookie</function> delete examples
Note that the value portion of the cookie will automatically be
urlencoded when you send the cookie, and when it is received, it
is automatically decoded and assigned to a variable by the same
name as the cookie name. To see the contents of our test
cookie in a script, simply use one of the following examples:
You may also set array cookies by using array notation in the
cookie name. This has the effect of setting as many cookies as
you have array elements, but when the cookie is received by your
script, the values are all placed in an array with the cookie's
name:
\n";
}
}
]]>
For more information on cookies, see Netscape's cookie
specification at &spec.cookies;.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 with Service Pack 1 applied does
not correctly deal with cookies that have their path parameter
set.
Netscape Communicator 4.05 and Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.x
appear to handle cookies incorrectly when the path and time
are not set.