Sessions and cookies?

Anon

Can you use cookies (to check on past connections to the site) and use sessions, (to hold values valid for this session only) on the same page. After I have said, session_start();, and then try to save a cookie, with setcookie(...), I get the message about already sent header info. Does anyone know if it is possible to do this, or if I am just messing something up?

veggie2u

Anon

session_start uses a cookie already. Use a database to store persistent cookies...phplib is my preference.

Anon

I plan to store user preferences in a database, but I would like to tell if a user has been to my site before. Therefore I will have one cookie that just consists of a users name (if they logged in last time). Then when they return I can look up safe info like preferences (from the database) without needing them to log in. I also need to keep track of session variables, such as if they have really logged in, or other variables that will be good only for the one session. I understand that sessions create a cookie, but won't that only make 2 cookies? Can't you have up to 20? What am I missing here?

Thanks,
veggie2u

Anon

I'm doing something similar with no problems. The "header already sent" error normally occurs if you output something to the browser before you call setcookie(). Remember, blank lines at the beginning or end of an included/required file count as output.

Anon

Hmmmm. That could be it. How about comments? Those are OK? I thought blank spaces were ignored thought. If I have 5 blank lines in the php code, will that mean I get 1 line sent to the browser? Or 5? When you say the blank line is sent, it doesn't mean that it is parsed into a blank line on the browser screen, right, just a blank line if you looked in the 'show source'?

thanks
veggie2u

Anon

The blank lines to look out for are the ones outside of the PHP tags. So this:

Line 1: <?php
Line 2: some code
Line 3:
Line 4: ?>

is fine, but this:

Line 1: <?php
Line 2: some code
Line 3: ?>
Line 4:

will cause headers to be sent.

And you're right, the blank lines will appear in the HTML source, not on the browser screen.

HTH,
Beth