setcookie

(PHP 4, PHP 5, PHP 7)

setcookie — Send a cookie

Description

setcookie ( string $name [, string $value = "" [, int $expires = 0 [, string $path = "" [, string $domain = "" [, bool $secure = FALSE [, bool $httponly = FALSE ]]]]]] ) : bool

setcookie ( string $name [, string $value = "" [, array $options = [] ]] ) : bool

setcookie() 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.

Once the cookies have been set, they can be accessed on the next page load with the $_COOKIE array. Cookie values may also exist in $_REQUEST.

Parameters

» RFC 6265 provides the normative reference on how each setcookie() parameter is interpreted.

name

The name of the cookie.

value

The value of the cookie. This value is stored on the clients computer; do not store sensitive information. Assuming the name is 'cookiename', this value is retrieved through $_COOKIE['cookiename']

expires

The time the cookie expires. This is a Unix timestamp so is in number of seconds since the epoch. In other words, you'll most likely set this with the time() function plus the number of seconds before you want it to expire. Or you might use mktime(). time()+60*60*24*30 will set the cookie to expire in 30 days. If set to 0, or omitted, the cookie will expire at the end of the session (when the browser closes).

Note:
You may notice the expires parameter takes on a Unix timestamp, as opposed to the date format Wdy, DD-Mon-YYYY HH:MM:SS GMT, this is because PHP does this conversion internally.

path

The path on the server in which the cookie will be available on. If set to '/', the cookie will be available within the entire domain. If set to '/foo/', the cookie will only be available within the /foo/ directory and all sub-directories such as /foo/bar/ of domain. The default value is the current directory that the cookie is being set in.

domain

The (sub)domain that the cookie is available to. Setting this to a subdomain (such as 'www.example.com') will make the cookie available to that subdomain and all other sub-domains of it (i.e. w2.www.example.com). To make the cookie available to the whole domain (including all subdomains of it), simply set the value to the domain name ('example.com', in this case).

Older browsers still implementing the deprecated » RFC 2109 may require a leading . to match all subdomains.

secure

Indicates that the cookie should only be transmitted over a secure HTTPS connection from the client. When set to TRUE, the cookie will only be set if a secure connection exists. On the server-side, it's on the programmer to send this kind of cookie only on secure connection (e.g. with respect to $_SERVER["HTTPS"]).

httponly

When TRUE the cookie will be made accessible only through the HTTP protocol. This means that the cookie won't be accessible by scripting languages, such as JavaScript. It has been suggested that this setting can effectively help to reduce identity theft through XSS attacks (although it is not supported by all browsers), but that claim is often disputed. Added in PHP 5.2.0. TRUE or FALSE

options

An associative array which may have any of the keys expires, path, domain, secure, httponly and samesite. The values have the same meaning as described for the parameters with the same name. The value of the samesite element should be either Lax or Strict. If any of the allowed options are not given, their default values are the same as the default values of the explicit parameters. If the samesite element is omitted, no SameSite cookie attribute is set.

Return Values

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.

Examples

Some examples follow how to send cookies:

Example #1 setcookie() send example


<?php
$value = 'something from somewhere';

setcookie("TestCookie", $value);
setcookie("TestCookie", $value, time()+3600);  /* expire in 1 hour */
setcookie("TestCookie", $value, time()+3600, "/~rasmus/", "example.com", 1);
?>

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. If you don't want this, you can use setrawcookie() instead if you are using PHP 5. To see the contents of our test cookie in a script, simply use one of the following examples:


<?php
// Print an individual cookie
echo $_COOKIE["TestCookie"];

// Another way to debug/test is to view all cookies
print_r($_COOKIE);
?>

Example #2 setcookie() delete example

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:


<?php
// set the expiration date to one hour ago
setcookie("TestCookie", "", time() - 3600);
setcookie("TestCookie", "", time() - 3600, "/~rasmus/", "example.com", 1);
?>

Example #3 setcookie() and arrays

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:


<?php
// set the cookies
setcookie("cookie[three]", "cookiethree");
setcookie("cookie[two]", "cookietwo");
setcookie("cookie[one]", "cookieone");

// after the page reloads, print them out
if (isset($_COOKIE['cookie'])) {
    foreach ($_COOKIE['cookie'] as $name => $value) {
        $name = htmlspecialchars($name);
        $value = htmlspecialchars($value);
        echo "$name : $value <br />\n";
    }
}
?>

The above example will output:

three : cookiethree
two : cookietwo
one : cookieone

Changelog

Version	Description
7.3.0	An alternative signature supporting an `options` array has been added. This signature supports also setting of the SameSite cookie attribute.
5.5.0	A Max-Age attribute is now included in the Set-Cookie header sent to the client.
5.2.0	The `httponly` parameter was added.

Notes

Note:
You can use output buffering to send output prior to the call of this function, with the overhead of all of your output to the browser being buffered in the server until you send it. You can do this by calling ob_start() and ob_end_flush() in your script, or setting the output_buffering configuration directive on in your php.ini or server configuration files.

Note:
If the PHP directive register_globals is set to on then cookie values will also be made into variables. In our examples below, $TestCookie will exist. It's recommended to use $_COOKIE.

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 expires parameter. A nice way to debug the existence of cookies is by simply calling print_r($_COOKIE);.
Cookies must be deleted with the same parameters as they were set with. If the value argument is an empty string, or FALSE, and all other arguments match a previous call to setcookie, then the cookie with the specified name will be deleted from the remote client. This is internally achieved by setting value to 'deleted' and expiration time to one year in past.
Because setting a cookie with a value of FALSE will try to delete the cookie, you should not use boolean values. Instead, use 0 for FALSE and 1 for TRUE.
Cookies names can be set as array names and will be available to your PHP scripts as arrays but separate cookies are stored on the user's system. Consider explode() to set one cookie with multiple names and values. It is not recommended to use serialize() for this purpose, because it can result in security holes.

Multiple calls to setcookie() are performed in the order called.

User Contributed Notes 47 notes

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303

walterquez ¶

7 years ago


Instead of this:

<?php setcookie( "TestCookie", $value, time()+(60*60*24*30) ); ?>



You can this:

<?php setcookie( "TestCookie", $value, strtotime( '+30 days' ) ); ?>

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155

Bachsau ¶

7 years ago


Want to remove a cookie?

Many people do it the complicated way:
setcookie('name', 'content', time()-3600);

But why do you make it so complicated and risk it not working, when the client's time is wrong? Why fiddle around with time();

Here's the easiest way to unset a cookie:
setcookie('name', 'content', 1);

Thats it.

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nacho at casinelli dot com ¶

2 years ago


It's worth a mention: you should avoid dots on cookie names.

<?php
// this will actually set 'ace_fontSize' name:
setcookie( 'ace.fontSize', 18 );
?>

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MrXCol ¶

8 years ago


If you're having problem with IE not accepting session cookies this could help:

It seems the IE (6, 7, 8 and 9) do not accept the part 'Expire=0' when setting a session cookie. To fix it just don't put any expire at all. The default behavior when the 'Expire' is not set is to set the cookie as a session one. 

(Firefox doesn't complains, btw.)

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paul nospam AT nospam sitepoint dot com ¶

12 years ago


Note when setting "array cookies" that a separate cookie is set for each element of the array.

On high traffic sites, this can substantially increase the size of subsequent HTTP requests from clients (including requests for static content on the same domain).

More importantly though, the cookie specification says that browsers need only accept 20 cookies per domain.  This limit is increased to 50 by Firefox, and to 30 by Opera, but IE6 and IE7 enforce the limit of 20 cookie per domain.  Any cookies beyond this limit will either knock out an older cookie or be ignored/rejected by the browser.

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Anonymous ¶

12 years ago


something that wasn't made clear to me here and totally confused me for a while was that domain names must contain at least two dots (.), hence 'localhost' is invalid and the browser will refuse to set the cookie! instead for localhost you should use false.

to make your code work on both localhost and a proper domain, you can do this:

<?php

$domain = ($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] != 'localhost') ? $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] : false;
setcookie('cookiename', 'data', time()+60*60*24*365, '/', $domain, false);

?>

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lferro9000 at gmail dot com ¶

2 years ago


Of notice, the cookie when set with a zero expire or ommited WILL not expire when the browser closes.

What happens is that the browser, when closes the window, if it is a well behaved browser, will delete the cookie from the cookie store.

However, the cookie will survive in the server until the garbage collector removes the session, which will happen only when it kicks in and checks the specified session is out of bounds of the setting stated in:

http://php.net/manual/en/session.configuration.php#ini.session.gc-maxlifetime

Please check also:

http://php.net/manual/en/session.security.ini.php

And in case of doubt, PHP runs on the webserver and has no way whatsoever to interact with a browser apart from receiving requests and answering with responses, so assuming that a cookie will be removed from a browser is just an "hint" for the browser. There is no warranty that such will happen as instructed.

That is one of the reasons why the cookie values sent to browsers by some platforms are encrypted and timestamped, to ensure that they are actual and not tampered.

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bluewaterbob ¶

12 years ago


if you are having problems seeing cookies sometimes or deleting cookies sometimes, despite following the advice below, make sure you are setting the cookie with the domain argument. Set it with the dot before the domain as the examples show: ".example.com".  I wasn't specifying the domain, and finally realized I was setting the cookie when the browser url had the http://www.example.com and later trying to delete it when the url didn't have the www. ie. http://example.com. This also caused the page to be unable to find the cookie when the www. wasn't in the domain.  (When you add the domain argument to the setcookie code that creates the cookie, make sure you also add it to the code that deletes the cookie.)

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gabe at fijiwebdesign dot com ¶

12 years ago


If you want to delete all cookies on your domain, you may want to use the value of:

<?php $_SERVER['HTTP_COOKIE'] ?>

rather than:

<?php $_COOKIE ?>

to dertermine the cookie names. 
If cookie names are in Array notation, eg: user[username] 
Then PHP will automatically create a corresponding array in $_COOKIE. Instead use $_SERVER['HTTP_COOKIE'] as it mirrors the actual HTTP Request header. 

<?php

// unset cookies
if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_COOKIE'])) {
    $cookies = explode(';', $_SERVER['HTTP_COOKIE']);
    foreach($cookies as $cookie) {
        $parts = explode('=', $cookie);
        $name = trim($parts[0]);
        setcookie($name, '', time()-1000);
        setcookie($name, '', time()-1000, '/');
    }
}

?>

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Eric ¶

9 years ago


The server my php code is running on has sessions disabled so I am forced to store a fair bit of arbitrary data in cookies.  Using array names was impractical and problematic, so I implemented a splitting routine.  I do not serialize any class instances, just arrays and simple objects.


In a nutshell, when setting a cookie value, I serialize it, gzcompress it, base64 encode it, break it into pieces and store it as a set of cookies.  To fetch the cookie value I get the named piece then iterate through piece names rebuilding the base64 data, then reverse the rest of the process.  The only other trick is deleting the pieces correctly.


Sessions are better, but if they are not available this is a viable alternative.  I chose gz over bz for compression because it looked faster with only slightly worse ratios.


Here is a simplified version of my implementation.  This is a good starting point but is not suitable for most uses.  For example, the domain and path are hard coded and no return values are checked for validity.


<?php

define( 'COOKIE_PORTIONS' , '_piece_' );


function clearpieces( $inKey , $inFirst ) {

    $expire = time()-3600;

    

    for ( $index = $inFirst ; array_key_exists( $inKey.COOKIE_PORTIONS.$index , $_COOKIE ) ; $index += 1 ) {

        setcookie( $inKey.COOKIE_PORTIONS.$index , '' , $expire , '/' , '' , 0 );

        unset( $_COOKIE[$inKey.COOKIE_PORTIONS.$index] );

    }

}


function clearcookie( $inKey ) {

    clearpieces( $inKey , 1 );

    setcookie( $inKey , '' , time()-3600 , '/' , '' , 0 );

    unset( $_COOKIE[$inKey] );

}


function storecookie( $inKey , $inValue , $inExpire ) {

    $decode = serialize( $inValue );

    $decode = gzcompress( $decode );

    $decode = base64_encode( $decode );

    

    $split = str_split( $decode , 4000 );//4k pieces

    $count = count( $split );

    

    for ( $index = 0 ; $index < $count ; $index += 1 ) {

        $result = setcookie( ( $index > 0 ) ? $inKey.COOKIE_PORTIONS.$index : $inKey , $split[$index] , $inExpire , '/' , '' , 0 );

    }

    

    clearpieces( $inKey , $count );

}


function fetchcookie( $inKey ) {

    $decode = $_COOKIE[$inKey];

    

    for ( $index = 1 ; array_key_exists( $inKey.COOKIE_PORTIONS.$index , $_COOKIE ) ; $index += 1 ) {

        $decode .= $_COOKIE[$inKey.COOKIE_PORTIONS.$index];

    }

    

    $decode = base64_decode( $decode );

    $decode = gzuncompress( $decode );

    

    return unserialize( $decode );

}

?>

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jay at w3prodigy dot com ¶

9 years ago


You can also delete cookies by supplying setcookie an empty value.

setcookie("w3p_cookie", "");

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ellert at vankoperen dot nl ¶

5 years ago


Caveat: if you use URL RewriteRules to get stuff like this: domain.com/bla/stuf/etc into parameters, you might run into a hickup when setting cookies.
At least in my setup a change in one of the parameters resulted in the cookie not being 'there' anymore.
The fix is simple: specify the domain. '/' will usualy do fine.

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dmitry dot koterov at gmail dot com ¶

4 years ago


Note that at least in PHP 5.5 setcookie() removes previously set cookies with the same name (even if you've set them via header()), so previously fired Set-Cookie headers with e.g. PHPSESSID name are not flushed to the browser. Even headers_list() doesn't see them after session_start():

header("Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=abc; path=/; domain=.sub.domain.com");
header("Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=abc; path=/; domain=.domain.com");
print_r(headers_list()); // here you see two Set-Cookie headers with domains for PHPSESSID
session_id('abc');
session_start();
print_r(headers_list()); // here you don't; you see only one Set-Cookie produced by session_start()

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laffen ¶

10 years ago


Note that the $_COOKIE variable not will hold multiple cookies with the same name. It is legitimate to set two cookies with the same name to the same host where the sub domain is different. 
<?php
setcookie("testcookie", "value1hostonly", time(), "/", ".example.com", 0, true);
setcookie("testcookie", "value2subdom", time(), "/", "subdom.example.com", 0, true);
?>
The next request from the browser will have both cookies in the $_SERVER['HTTP_COOKIE'] variable, but only one of them will be found in the $_COOKIE variable. Requests to subdom.example.com will have both cookies, while browser request to example.com or www.example.com only sends the cookie with the "value1hostonly" value.

<?php
$kaker = explode(";", $_SERVER['HTTP_COOKIE']);
foreach($kaker as $val){
    $k = explode("=", $val);
    echo trim($k[0]) . " => " . $k[1];
}

// output
testcookie => value1hostonly
testcookie => value2subdom

?>

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jonathan dot bergeron at rve dot ulaval dot ca ¶

12 years ago


About the delete part, I found that Firefox only remove the cookie when you submit the same values for all parameters, except the date, which sould be in the past. Submiting blank values didn't work for me.


Example :

- set -


<?php setcookie( "name", "value", "future_timestamp", "path", "domain" ); ?>



- delete -

<?php setcookie( "name", "value", "past_timestamp", "path", "domain" ); ?>



Jonathan

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gareth at gw126 dot com ¶

13 years ago


You can use cookies to prevent a browser refresh repeating some action from a form post... (providing the client is cookie enabled!)


<?php

//Flag up repeat actions (like credit card transaction, etc)

if(count($_POST)>0) {

    $lastpost= isset($_COOKIE['lastpost']) ? $_COOKIE['lastpost'] : '';

    if($lastpost!=md5(serialize($_POST))) {

        setcookie('lastpost', md5(serialize($_POST)));

        $_POST['_REPEATED']=0;

    } else {

        $_POST['_REPEATED']=1;

    }

}


//At this point, if $_POST['_REPEATED']==1, then  the user

//has hit the refresh button; so don't do any actions that you don't

//want to repeat!

?>



Hope that helps :)


Gareth

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mkmohsinali at gmail dot com ¶

8 years ago


#cookies.php
/*This code will demonstrate use of cookies with PHP
It is very easy to understand and is better for beginner to
understand and get idea about power of cookies when used
with PHP.Here we give user a form to choose colors he/she
likes for website and when he/she visits site again within one
hour his/her settings are saved and read from cookie 
and he/she doesn't have to set the page color and page
text color again.You can change time from 3600
seconds to whatever you deem appropriate in your case.
if you don't understand anything please email me*/

<?php
#checking if form has been submitted
if (isset($_POST['submitted'])){
#if yes (form is submitted) assign values from POST array to variables
$newbgColor=$_POST['bgColor'];
$newtxtColor=$_POST['txtColor'];
#set cookies
setcookie("bgColor",$newbgColor,time()+3600);
setcookie("txtColor",$newtxtColor,time()+3600);

}
#in case user has come for first time and cookies are not set then
if ((!isset($_COOKIE['bgColor']) ) && (!isset($_COOKIE['txtColor']))){
$bgColor = "Black";
$txtColor="White";
}
#if cookies are set then use them
else{
$bgColor = $_COOKIE['bgColor'];
$txtColor = $_COOKIE['txtColor'];
}
?>
<!-- HTML Page-->
<html>
<body bgcolor="<?php echo $bgColor ?>" text="<?php echo $txtColor ?>"> 
<form action= "<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']; ?>" method ="POST">
<p>Body Color:</p>
<select name=bgColor>
<option value ="Red">Red</option>
<option value ="Green" selected>Green</option>
<option value ="Blue">Blue</option>
<option value ="Yellow">Yellow</option>
<option value ="Black">Black</option>
<option value ="Brown">Brown</option>
<option value ="White">White</option>
</select>
<p>Text Color:</p>
<select name=txtColor>
<tion value ="Red">Red</option>
<option value ="Green" selected>Green</option>
<option value ="Blue">Blue</option>
<option value ="Yellow">Yellow</option>
<option value ="Black">Black</option>
<option value ="Brown">Brown</option>
<option value ="White">White</option>
</select>
<input type ="hidden" name="submitted" value="true"></br>
<input type="submit" value="remind">
</form>
</body>
</html>

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jdknock (at) gMaIl (dot) com ¶

8 years ago


IE7 can have trouble with settings cookies that are embedded in an iframe. The problem lies with a W3C standard called Platform for Privacy Preferences or P3P for short.


To overcome, include the header:


header('P3P:CP="IDC DSP COR ADM DEVi TAIi PSA PSD IVAi IVDi CONi HIS OUR IND CNT"');


before setting the cookie.

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stovenator at gmail dot com ¶

12 years ago


If you are having issues with IE7 and setcookie(), be sure to verify that the cookie is set via http for http sites, and https for https site. 

Also, if the time is incorrect on your server, IE7 will also disallow those cookies from being set.

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ahmetantmen at msn dot com ¶

12 years ago


You can be sure about the cookie files contents weren't changed.

<?php

$Seperator = '--';
$uniqueID = 'Ju?hG&F0yh9?=/6*GVfd-d8u6f86hp';
$Data = 'Ahmet '.md5('123456789');

setcookie('VerifyUser', $Data.$Seperator.md5($Data.$uniqueID));

if ($_COOKIE) {
   $Cut = explode($Seperator, $_COOKIE['VerifyUser']);
   if (md5($Cut[0].$uniqueID) === $Cut[1]) {
       $_COOKIE['VerifyUser'] = $Cut[0];
   } else {
       die('Cookie data is invalid!!!');
   }
}

echo $_COOKIE['VerifyUser'];

?>

Create a unique id for your site and create a hash with md5($Data.$uniqueID). Attacker can understant that it must be re-hash after change cookie content.
But doesn't. Because cannot guess your unique id. Seperate your hash and data with seperator and send that cookie. Control that hash of returned value and your unique id's is same returned hash. Otherwise you have to stop attack. Sorry for my poor english!

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cwillard at fastmail dot fm ¶

12 years ago


If you're looking to set multiple values in your cookie (rather than setting multiple cookies) you might find these useful.

<?php
function build_cookie($var_array) {
  if (is_array($var_array)) {
    foreach ($var_array as $index => $data) {
      $out.= ($data!="") ? $index."=".$data."|" : "";
    }
  }
  return rtrim($out,"|");
}

function break_cookie ($cookie_string) {
  $array=explode("|",$cookie_string);
  foreach ($array as $i=>$stuff) {
    $stuff=explode("=",$stuff);
    $array[$stuff[0]]=$stuff[1];
    unset($array[$i]);
  }
  return $array;
}
?>
Hopefully someone finds these useful.

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hansel at gretel dot com ¶

12 years ago


The following code snippet combines abdullah's and Charles Martin's examples into a powerful combination function (and fixes at least one bug in the process):

<?php
  function set_cookie_fix_domain($Name, $Value = '', $Expires = 0, $Path = '', $Domain = '', $Secure = false, $HTTPOnly = false)
  {
    if (!empty($Domain))
    {
      // Fix the domain to accept domains with and without 'www.'.
      if (strtolower(substr($Domain, 0, 4)) == 'www.')  $Domain = substr($Domain, 4);
      $Domain = '.' . $Domain;

      // Remove port information.
      $Port = strpos($Domain, ':');
      if ($Port !== false)  $Domain = substr($Domain, 0, $Port);
    }

    header('Set-Cookie: ' . rawurlencode($Name) . '=' . rawurlencode($Value)
                          . (empty($Expires) ? '' : '; expires=' . gmdate('D, d-M-Y H:i:s', $Expires) . ' GMT')
                          . (empty($Path) ? '' : '; path=' . $Path)
                          . (empty($Domain) ? '' : '; domain=' . $Domain)
                          . (!$Secure ? '' : '; secure')
                          . (!$HTTPOnly ? '' : '; HttpOnly'), false);
  }
?>

Basically, if the domain parameter is supplied, it is converted to support a broader range of domains.  This behavior may or may not be desireable (e.g. could be a security problem depending on the server) but it makes cookie handling oh-so-much-nicer (IMO).

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Anonymous ¶

9 years ago


A period in a cookie name (like user.name) seems to show up in the $_COOKIE array as an underscore (so user_name). This means that for example $_COOKIE["user_name"] must be used to read a cookie that has been set with setcookie("user.name" ...), which is already rather confusing. 

Furthermore the variable $_COOKIE["user_name"] will retain the value set by setcookie("user.name" ...) and no amount of calling setcookie("user_name" ...) will alter this value. This is rather trivially fixed by clearing the "user.name" cookie, but it can take a while to realize this since there's only "user_name" in $_COOKIE.

Hope this saves someone some time.

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Carl V ¶

14 years ago


If you want to delete all the cookies set by your domain, you may run the following:

<?php
$cookiesSet = array_keys($_COOKIE);
for ($x=0;$x<count($cookiesSet);$x++) setcookie($cookiesSet[$x],"",time()-1);
?>

Very useful when doing logout scripts and the cookie name may have changed (long story).

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RC ¶

9 years ago


For those of your banging your head as to why a cookie is not present when Internet Explorer 6 prints, the explanation is quite interesting. After a bit of investigation, a cookie with an expiration time other than 0 fails to be passed from IE6 to the server when printing. A cookie with an expiration time of 0 is sent.

Therefore:

setcookie("TestCookie", $value, time()+3600); //will not be sent from Print / Print Preview in IE6

setcookie("TestCookie", $value, 0); //will be sent from Print / Print Preview in IE6

I'll let everyone figure out who's bright idea it was to not send normal expiring cookies when printing in IE6...

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bocian941 at pawno dot pl ¶

8 years ago


My 2 functions to use "live cookies":


<?php

    function SetCookieLive($name, $value='', $expire = 0, $path = '', $domain='', $secure=false, $httponly=false)

    {

        $_COOKIE[$name] = $value;

        return setcookie($name, $value, $expire, $path, $domain, $secure, $httponly);

    }


    function RemoveCookieLive($name)

    {

        unset($_COOKIE[$name]);

        return setcookie($name, NULL, -1);

    }

?>

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Anonymous ¶

8 months ago


I haven't seen this mentioned here and had a lot of issues (and created a lot of stupid hacks) before I figured this out.

If you have a couple of environments for example, and are trying to set cookies on two domains:

example.com (main site)
dev.example.com (dev site)

In this case your (same named) cookies will interfere with each other if you're trying to set cookies with the domain parameter.  

Simply use an empty string for the domain parameter and the cookies will refer to each host separately.

If you use the subdomain www. on the main site this won't be an issue, but without a subdomain you'll have issues with reading each others' cookies.

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sergey dot shuchkin at gmail dot com ¶

9 months ago


Please use code like this to detect cookies support:

<?php

if ( isset($_COOKIE['counter'])) {    
    setcookie('counter', $_COOKIE['counter'] + 1 );
    echo 'Counter='.$_COOKIE['counter'];
} else if ( isset($_GET['set_cookie'])) {
    echo 'Oops! Cookies disabled :(';
} else {
    setcookie('counter', 1);
    header('Location: ?set_cookie=1');
    return;
}

?>

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stuff at joneva dot de ¶

2 years ago


How to store a cookie in php with JSON and read it in JavaScript correctly without using setcookieraw

$defaultActions = array(
                '1' => '0',
                '2' => '0',
                '3' => '0',
                '4' => '0',
                '5' => '0',
                '6' => '0',
                '7' => '0',
                '8' => '0',
                '9' => '0',
                '10' => '0'
            );
$json_str = json_encode($defaultActions); 

//delete all cookies
if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_COOKIE'])) {
    $cookies = explode(';', $_SERVER['HTTP_COOKIE']);
    foreach($cookies as $cookie) {
        $parts = explode('=', $cookie);
        $name = trim($parts[0]);
        setcookie($name, '', time()-1000);
        setcookie($name, '', time()-1000, '/');
    }
} 
//setrawcookie("test", $json_str, false,"/",false); 

setcookie("test", $json_str, false,"/",false);

?>

<script type="text/javascript">
    
    function getCookie(name) {
        var value = "; " + document.cookie;
        var parts = value.split("; " + name + "=");
        if (parts.length == 2)
            return parts.pop().split(";").shift();
    } 
    
    console.log(decodeURIComponent(getCookie('test')));
    
</script>

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byz ¶

3 years ago


exmaple with test.comï¼›

setcookie('empty_domain','value',time()+3600,'')  
 equal       test.com

setcookie('test_com_domain','value',time()+3600,'','test.com')   
equal       .test.com

setcookie('dot_test_com_domain','value',time()+3600,'','.test.com')  
 equal       .test.com

ps:   .test.com   has its self    and child domain

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chris at styl dot ee ¶

8 years ago


I was searching for a simple example of creating a cookie, storing a random number and updating it on refresh. I couldn't find one so I had to figure it out on my own....

- - - - 
One thing to *NOTE* is technically you can't update a cookie, you can only overwrite it with a new one with the same name.

- - - -

This creates a random number, stores it in a cookie, then references it on refresh, checks for duplicates and does necessary correction, then stores it again, rinse and repeat...

<?php
ob_start();
$MaxCount = 4;// set the max of the counter, in my tests "4" = (0,1,2,3) I adjusted below (+1) to get a "real" 4 (0,1,2,3,4) this is in reality 5 keys to humans, you can adjust script to eliminate "0", but my script makes use of the "0"

$random =(rand()%($MaxCount+1));//give me a random number limited by the max, adding "1" because computers start counting at "0"

if(!isset($_COOKIE['random'])){// check if random number cookie is not set
    //echo"not set";
    setcookie('random', $random);//set the cookie for the first time
    }else{
    $lastRandom= $_COOKIE['random']; //hold the last number if it was set before
    if($lastRandom == $random){//some logic to avoid repeats
     if($random < $MaxCount){//if below max, add 1
        $random++;
        //echo "under the max, adding 1, ";    
    }elseif($random >= ($MaxCount-1)){// if for some reason the random number is more than max or equal to it -1, and an additional -1 for max count in initial var (so in reality this -1 from intial max var, and -1 from $random which should be the same number)
            $random--;
            //echo "hit the max, subtracting 1, ";
        }else{
        $random++;
        //echo "no case match, adding 1, ";    
        }
    //echo "(".$lastRandom.", ".$random. "), they matched initally - was it fixed?";
    }else{
    //echo "(".$lastRandom.", ".$random. "), they DO NOT match";
    setcookie('random', $random);    
    }
    //echo"is set: {$_COOKIE['random']}";
}

ob_end_flush();

?>

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isooik at gmail-antispam dot com ¶

11 years ago


Here's a more advanced version of the php setcookie() alternative function:


<?php


    /**

     * A better alternative (RFC 2109 compatible) to the php setcookie() function

     *

     * @param string Name of the cookie

     * @param string Value of the cookie

     * @param int Lifetime of the cookie

     * @param string Path where the cookie can be used

     * @param string Domain which can read the cookie

     * @param bool Secure mode?

     * @param bool Only allow HTTP usage?

     * @return bool True or false whether the method has successfully run

     */

    function createCookie($name, $value='', $maxage=0, $path='', $domain='', $secure=false, $HTTPOnly=false)

    {

        $ob = ini_get('output_buffering');


        // Abort the method if headers have already been sent, except when output buffering has been enabled

        if ( headers_sent() && (bool) $ob === false || strtolower($ob) == 'off' )

            return false;


        if ( !empty($domain) )

        {

            // Fix the domain to accept domains with and without 'www.'.

            if ( strtolower( substr($domain, 0, 4) ) == 'www.' ) $domain = substr($domain, 4);

            // Add the dot prefix to ensure compatibility with subdomains

            if ( substr($domain, 0, 1) != '.' ) $domain = '.'.$domain;


            // Remove port information.

            $port = strpos($domain, ':');


            if ( $port !== false ) $domain = substr($domain, 0, $port);

        }


        // Prevent "headers already sent" error with utf8 support (BOM)

        //if ( utf8_support ) header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');


        header('Set-Cookie: '.rawurlencode($name).'='.rawurlencode($value)

                                    .(empty($domain) ? '' : '; Domain='.$domain)

                                    .(empty($maxage) ? '' : '; Max-Age='.$maxage)

                                    .(empty($path) ? '' : '; Path='.$path)

                                    .(!$secure ? '' : '; Secure')

                                    .(!$HTTPOnly ? '' : '; HttpOnly'), false);

        return true;

    }


?>



Regards,

Isaak

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mike ¶

12 years ago


Be careful of using the same cookie name in subdirectories. Setting a simple cookie 


<?php setcookie("region", $_GET['set_region']); ?>



both in the root / and for instance in this case /admin/ will create 2 cookies with different paths. In reading the cookies back only the first one is read regardless of path.

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Anonymous ¶

12 years ago


if you only want to do something once per unique visitor, you can test if a cookie is set, and if not, set the cookie and perform the action. This being the poorman's version, it has a problem, where if a user is blocking cookies they will appear as a first time visitor each time. What you can do to avoid this is to set a test cookie first and check that it exists. If it exists, then check to see if your second cookie has been set. If the first one is set, but the second isn't, then you know this is a first time visitor.

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adruff at gmail dot com ¶

13 years ago


If you intend to use persistent cookies (vice session cookies that are deleted when the browser is closed) be aware:
1) Firefox appears to require that you include all paramaters, or it will ignore the expiration and treat the cookie as a session cookie
2) My version of firefox (1.5.0.6) defaults to 'keep cookies until i close firefox' , which essentially makes every cookie a session cookie. This of course sucks for devs, but i suppose is supposed to be a security feature for the end user. If the user wants to configure firefox to respect the expiration date and retain cookies beyond the session, the user must change it to 'keep cookies until they expire'.

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apex at xepa dot nl ¶

15 years ago


Note on setting cookies allowing access to sites:


If you are not using something "personal" from the computer that you are sending the cookie too watch out.  Via javascript it is possible to steal cookies from other users.  Thus allowing the stealer to login to your site as another user that might not have access otherwise.  Try to add something like the user's ip in the cookie and allowing access from that ip only with the stored cookie data.


[Editor's note: ... or simply use sessions. You can't be sure that the visitor will use the same IP the next visit. Not even on the next request (thanks to proxy servers)]

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16 years ago


When using your cookies on a webserver that is not on the standard port 80, you should NOT include the :[port] in the "Cookie domain" parameter, since this would not be recognized correctly.

I had the issue working on a project that runs on multiple servers (development, production, etc.). One of the servers is running on a different port (together with other websites that run on the same server but on different ports).

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-1

terry at scribendi dot com ¶

14 years ago


A few comments have suggested using serialize() to set object or array data into a cookie.  There are a couple of reasons to be carefull with that technique:

Security: If the cookie is human readable, then it is also fairly easy for end users to play around with it.  Wrapping your cookie setting and getting in an encryption routine will prevent tampering, and make sure that your cookies don't make any sense to any client-side exploits or other sites they get sent to thanks to browser bugs.

Bulk: If you serialize even a fairly simple class, then you get a lot of data.  Large cookies will make browser requests fat and slow, and some browsers have a limit on cookie size, so think about what data you really need to persist, and create __sleep() and __wakeup() methods to package the data into the shortest possible form.  You can get better and faster results when you write your own __sleep() and __wakup() to implode() or pack() your data, than by using zlib compress() on the serialized object.

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-2

vanclute at gmail dot com ¶

8 years ago


I have been tearing my hair out wondering why a cookie would not delete.  Despite countless discussions of reasons this can happen all over the internet, none of them addresses my case.  Here is what was happening:

My cookies have been formed kindof as an array, and the name of the cookie to be deleted is being passed in a variable, so I was using this to attempt to delete the cookie (stripped to the minimum for simplicity of the example):

<?php
    setcookie("$cookiename[id]");
?>

But it simply would not work.  Ultimately what DID work was this:

<?php
    setcookie($cookiename."[id]");
?>

So I had to concatenate the variable to the "element id" and then the cookies deleted without any issue.

I hope this saves someone else from a sleepless night!!

Jonathan

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-1

simon at ruderich dot com ¶

14 years ago


If you want to delete a session cookie, you can do it with this code:

<?php
  session_start();

  // many code

  $sessionName = session_name();
  $sessionCookie = session_get_cookie_params();

  session_destroy();

  setcookie($sessionName, false, $sessionCookie['lifetime'], $sessionCookie['path'], $sessionCookie['domain'], $sessionCookie['secure']);
?>

This works also well if the session cookie params or the session name were changed.

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-2

dave at fubra dot com ¶

16 years ago


There are several characters that dont work correctly if part of the cookie name, I in particular ran into problems using = as part of the cookie name ie/


<?php setcookie('dE4fR=', $foo); ?>



this was as a result of base64_encode() ing a variable to use as the name. The cookie was being set fine but the = is stored as a little square character in the cookie which prevent proper retreival.


The solution for me was to use md5() instead of base64_encode() but any other method which avoids the = sign should also solve the problem

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-3

Anonymous ¶

12 years ago


If you ever find yourself in a situation where you need to overwrite a non-PHP application's session cookie, you can do that with the following line:


<?php

header("Set-Cookie: SIDNAME=$overwrite; path=/; secure");

?>



I couldn't get setcookie() to do this for all major web browsers, but manually sending the header did the trick. Note: Remove secure if you aren't mandating SSL connections.

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-2

danielpopescu93 at gmail dot com ¶

7 years ago


Hei, so here is what problem I had, maybe it will help someone in the future:
I couldn't delete a cookie, not even set it a different value. I think that is because it had a name following the rule FirstSecondThird. So it had uppercase letters. 
After I modified the name everithing worked. 

Another note:
Just for safety you should put what you want to put in the cookie in a var first.

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-4

jacobkamphansen at gmail dot com ¶

8 years ago


I've been pulling my hair for a couple of minutes (read: hours) and finally figured out why setcookie in my case, returned the "headers already sent"-error:

The file in question was orignally saved as ANSI in Notepad and worked flawlessly, but when saved with UTF-8-encoding, it didn't work. So after trying phpDesigner 7, I was able to both save the file in UTF-8 AND remove the BOM (byte-order-mark which is output BEFORE the cookie is set and thereby fails everything).

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-4

herrkampfgarten at gmail dot com ¶

6 years ago


Please note that setting the expiry to some timestamp in the past is a common way to get rid of a cookie. However, depending on the value you might set to "invalidate" a cookie immediately, this may pose a threat to the privacy of your user's data, especially when it comes to session cookies. 

If you write "0" and "expire-in-the-past" into a session cookie, it remains on the client-side until the clean-up mechanism of the browser hits. (That might be anything from no-time to a very long time. I'm not even thinking of app-based mobile browsers that won't close properly or do their best to ignore standards and RFCs and stuff...)

So, if you have sufficiently messed up your ways of picking up existing session IDs and write-closing their data to your server, the session's data might move from file "sess_(random)" to "sess_0", because that is exactly the identifier that is referred in the cookie.

From now on (at least until your server decides to clean up) there is data laying open wide to anyone requesting the session "0". Which may happen by accident (i.e. another user gains an own "0"-cookie) or malice (i.e. forgery).

Long story short, ALWAYS use an empty string instead of a "0" value for invalidating a session cookie.

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-1

dont at mail dot me ¶

2 years ago


> "When deleting a cookie you should assure that the expiration date is in the past, to trigger the removal mechanism in your browser"

This part of the documentation is no longer accurate. On my version of PHP (5.6.28) setting a null, empty string or boolean false value causes the server to ignore your expire date parameter and always sends value "deleted" and expire date 1970-01-01 00:00:01.

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-4

mleer at sp dot nl ¶

16 years ago


P3P is a good idea. But.

IE 6 features an inadequate definition of third party cookies.

If your site is hosted on server A and your PHP stuff is coming in a framesetting from server B your setcookie-attempts will be blocked when default privacy settings are deployed. Your secondparty-cookie will be regarded as a thirdparty-cookie.


So what you do is not read the P3P-Internet Explorer 6-manual at MS but send a header like


<?php

header('P3P: CP="NOI ADM DEV PSAi COM NAV OUR OTRo STP IND DEM"');

?>



before doing the setcookie-thing. This will enable your cookie to survive any IE-6 privacy settings.


You won't do this if you're working for some doubleclick institution, because if you do, you... you...well... you are not a very nice person!

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setcookie

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