This section provides a tutorial example on how to set and send a cookie with the setcookie() function, and how to receive a cookie with the $_COOKIE array.
To help us understand how to send and receive cookies, I wrote the following PHP tutorial example script page, CookieTest.php:
<?php #CookieTest.php
# Copyright (c) 2005 by Dr. Herong Yang, http://www.herongyang.com/
#
$numCookies = count( array_keys($_COOKIE) );
$numCookies++;
$cookieName = "Cookie_$numCookies";
$cookieValue = "My cookie value";
setcookie($cookieName, $cookieValue);
print("<pre>\n");
print("Cookies added by the server:\n");
print(" $cookieName: $cookieValue\n");
print("\nCookies received by the server:\n");
foreach ($_COOKIE as $k => $v) {
print " $k = $v\n";
}
print "</pre>\n";
?>
When I ran run this script with a browser, I got:
Cookies added by the server:
Cookie_1: My cookie value
Cookies received by the server:
When I click the refresh button of the browser, the page changed with:
Cookies added by the server:
Cookie_2: My cookie value
Cookies received by the server:
Cookie_1 = My cookie value
What happened here was that when I opened the page the first time, the server
received no cookie from the browser's HTTP request. So my page added the first cookie
named as "Cookie_1" to the HTTP response.
When I clicked the refresh button, the browser sent my first cookie back to
the server in the HTTP request. Then my page added the second cookie named as
"Cookie_2" in the response.
If I keep clicking the refresh button, more and more cookies would be added
to the request and response. But there is a limit. The browser will only take
up to 20 cookies from one Web server.
