PHPSESSID customization

bizshop

Is there a way to customize the session ID in PHP4 from the current randomness to something more usable and human-readable (like DateTime+Uniquenumber)

Anon

Generate a random number and wrap md5 around it. That's a unique number for a session ID.

feigenblatt

I think the reason for unreadability is security.

If I know my session ID is dado_today,
I can fake yours by creating a cookie in my machine as yourname_today.

guessing a random number is quite hard.

But if that's not a problem for you, or if you have other ways of enforcing security (which is always good), try using session_name(string name).
I'm not sure if you have to use it in every page before using start_session().

Did I get your question right?
disclaimer: I'm a newbie 🙂

feigenblatt

I'm possibly mixing the session ID and the variable/cookie name which holds the session ID.
How does one set the session ID then?

bizshop

To clarify:
When you run session_start(), it writes an ID to a temporary folder and keeps track of the user this way. For my shopping cart, I assign the user an ID and keep track of them. I can register the UID with session_register(UID), but I'm wondering why I need both.

The advantage of a user readable ID is tremendous when you have to look at your MySQL table and troubleshoot. My UID right now is the datetimegroup+IP of the visitor+a secret security code. If someone is having problems, I can look at the UserID's in the tables and find their datetimegroup and IP without going blind from the randomness of PHPSESSID

I'm wondering how to fix the sessionID that PHP automatically generates.