Checking for cookies?

[crazney]

Hi, is there a easy way to check to see if the user of my website has cookies enabled - (eg, to see if my php4 session variables will work on them)?

Thanks

David

[jolly]

even if there was there woul;d be nothing to stop users disabling cookies halfway thru your site...if you absolutely have to save state then look at passing sessions thru the url

[[deleted]]

to check for cookies being enabled or not, try:

if ($HTTP_COOKIE=="")
{echo "please enable cookies";
exit;
}

The idea is to see if the cookie variable contains either the session ID or the empty string, which means cookies are not enabled. Although this appears to work well in Netscape, I find that cookies enabled in Internet Explorer (only tried this on v5) will result the above message to appear, and is remedied by refreshing it once. I know this is a clumsy solution, but I'm only a beginner at web site programming. However, I'd welcome knowledge of a neater solution if anyone knows of one.

Thanks