Any Cookie coders here?

vincenzo · Jun 12, 2006

Hi all,
I have never coded cookies, so please bare with me.
What I need, is to create a cookie that will store the referring URL, and date, for visitors.

Open to suggestions, but think I only need to store the following:

- Refferring URL
- Date of first visit
- Cookie expiry date

Purpose:
Need to track each form submission, with info regarding which site and/or banner referred these leads.

hence, I would then like to use the cookie information within the various forms on my site as a hidden field value. The forms use PHP/MySQL to both send an email with results and store into databse.

Would appreciate any help.
Many thanks,

- Vince

lee101 · Jun 12, 2006

Ok, cookies are very easy to do with php, i'll try to talk you through it but the best referenece is the official php site - http://uk2.php.net/manual/en/function.setcookie.php

The code to set a cookie in php is quite simply setcookie()
the simplest form you can set a cookie is:

PHP:

$name="cookie1";
$value="hello";
setcookie("$name", $value);

this will set a cookie called cookie1, and the data within it will be hello, but remember when setting a cookie using php always put all of the code ABOVE any text, eg:

PHP:

<?php
$name="cookie1";
$value="hello";
setcookie("$name", $value);
//then the rest of the page
?>
<html>

a cookie such as that will never expire, then to retrieve the data from the cookie you use:
$_COOKIE['cookiename']
so once the cookie above is set, to view its data on another php page you would use:

PHP:

<?php
$cookiedata=$_COOKIE['cookie1'];
echo $cookiedata;
?>

which would return "hello", you just repeat those steps for each of the items of data that you want to be set as a cookie

hope this helps

Lee

Dan · Jun 12, 2006

setcookie("name", "value", time()+86400);
That will set $_COOKIE['name'] to "value" for one day.

How long do cookies last if you don't set when they expire?

lee101 · Jun 13, 2006

i think they just last forever, ot until you delete the cookies manually, but something i learnt yesterday was that if you set the time to "0" it will act as a session cookie, and be deleted as soon as the browser window is closed

maximum · Jun 13, 2006

lee101 said:
i think they just last forever, ot until you delete the cookies manually, but something i learnt yesterday was that if you set the time to "0" it will act as a session cookie, and be deleted as soon as the browser window is closed

Actually, don't set cookie to "0". Leaving it with NO set value, means it is session-only (closes when browser closes - as noted on link Lee gave above, or when cookie is killed-off by code, whichever comes first). Setting it to "0" makes it non-existant/pre-expired in some browsers from the get-go.

Any Cookie coders here?

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