Lose cookie index on refresh

PHP
1

I’m writing a little in-house script and thought I’d use cookies instead of sessions.

I can’t get the $_COOKIE[‘last’] index to stay after refresh:

<?php
setcookie("user", "Joe", time() + 3600*24);
?>
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Title of the document</title>
</head>

<body>
<?php 
$_COOKIE['last'] = "Y";
var_dump($_COOKIE);
?>
</body>

</html>

On a different script, I simply tried to echo $_COOKIE[‘last’] , but got a notice that it’s not there. var_dump() proves that:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Title of the document</title>
</head>

<body>
<?php 
var_dump($_COOKIE);
echo $_COOKIE['last'];

?>
</body>

</html>

It’s been a while since I worked with cookies. What am I missing?

In the meantime, I’m back to successfully using sessions.

2

It just occurred to me that cookies wasn’t designed to do that. Like I said, it’s been awhile.

3

A cookie value is set on http request so in order for a cookie to display you need to redirect somewhere. So setting the cookie then immediately trying to echo it will not work. Try setting it then using a header redirect some where else with a var_dump.

But on the other hand if sessions are working for you and you know how to use them you might as well stick with sessions.

4

Thanks iamjones.

Turns out that this code will add an index, but I can’t find any documentation on this notation. I’d appreciate any comments or thoughts on this snippet:

$last = $_COOKIE['last'] . ', YEP';
setcookie("last", $last);