IE5.5 and setcookie?

Junior WebHelper Joined: 03 Feb 2002 Posts: 4

Hi there,

I was wondering if anyone had a reliable way of setting cookies that *don't* expire at the end of the session with IE5.5 - setcookie and the various header methods explained on php.net (http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.setcookie.php) don't seem to have any effect Sad

For the record, the code I am currently using is the MySetCookie function from the above link (code below), called as follows, where $sess_last_visit holds the value of the cookie from the previous visit, or -1 if there was no previous visit:

Code:

MySetCookie("lastvisit", $sess_last_visit, (time()+31536000), "/", "", 0);

MySetCookie:

Code:

function MySetCookie ($CkyName, $CkyVal, $exp, $pth, $Domain, $Secure) {
static $mycky;
$exp = strftime("%A, %d-%b-%Y %H:%M:%S", $exp);
$cookiestr = sprintf("%s=%s; domain=%s; path=%s; expires=%s", $CkyName, $CkyValue, $Domain, $pth, $exp);
$mycky = ( ($mycky) ? "$mycky\n" : "") . "Set-Cookie: $cookiestr";
header($mycky);
}

What makes this even more bizarre is that it *seemed* to work, albeit erratically, but now doesn't seem to work at all - and I haven't changed the code!

Any thoughts, suggestions or links would be much appreciated!

Junior WebHelper Joined: 03 Feb 2002 Posts: 4

Yeah, MySetCookie is what I'm currently using. The confusing thing is that it *was* working... and now it's not. I've got cookies set to "prompt" in my browser, and the PHPSESSID cookie is getting set, but not the long term one that gets saved to the users hard drive Sad

Junior WebHelper Joined: 03 Feb 2002 Posts: 4

Cool, thanks for the method Andrew Smile

I'm gonna go try it now. One thought I had... to reset a cookie, do I have to delete the previous value?

By this I mean, the cookie lastvisit tracks when the user last visited (duh:)), but to store the time of the current visit into lastvisit, do I have to delete the existing lastvisit cookie?

Thanks!
Christo

PS: Will let you know the results of your method ASAP.

Junior WebHelper Joined: 03 Feb 2002 Posts: 4

Ah hah!

Problem solved... it was a combination of a rather subtle bug in my logic (in hindsight, not surprising), plus the fact that Internet Explorer, once a cookie has been set, does not prompt you if a site is changing the value of that cookie (I've had cookies set to "Prompt" while trying to debug this thing).

Thus, once lastvisit had been set once, I was never prompted again when the value of it was changed... and I expected I would. Hence I assumed the cookie was not being set at all (because the bug in my logic was simply setting the cookie it to its old value - doh!)

Many thanks to those who have helped me in discovering this painfully obvious fact.

Cheers
Christo