setting new and updating multiple cookies

epp_b

I'm trying to create a bit of a PHP shopping cart. I've got it working quite nicely, to a point. It places the cookie, the cart parses its data from the cookie, you can leave the cart and return later to find that your item is still retained with the cookie. Only one problem: you can't order more than one item, which renders it next to useless.

I'm placing cookies in an array so that I can place multiple cookies into one. The cookie arrays are read into the script which will display the cookie data. So, if I order one item that places a cookie called "cartdata[0]", I need the next item that I order to place a cookie called "cartdata[1]". I've tried:

$grab_cookie = $_COOKIE["phpcartdata"];
$count_cart = count($grab_cookie);

for ($i=0;$i<$count_cart;$i++) {
			if ($grab_cookie[$i] == "") {
				$noitem .= "1";
			}
			else {
				$noitem .= "0";
			}
		}
		if (!ereg("0", $noitem)) {
			setcookie("phpcartdata[0]", $cart_data, time()+300);
		}
		else {
			$count_current_cookie = count($grab_cookie);
			$count_current_cookie++;
			setcookie("phpcartdata[$count_current_cookie]", $cart_data, time()+300);
		}
}

When I want to empty the cart:

for ($i=0;$i<count_cart;$i++) {
	setcookie("cartdata[$i]");
}

The problem is that the first script will keep incrementing the cookie over and over again, so I'll have large gaps in the array.

cartdata[0]
cartdata[1]
cartdata[12]
cartdata[13]

No necessary pattern in the gaps. What's wrong here?

Weedpacket

One suggestion would be to have a cookie containing an array of shopping cart items, not an array of cookies....

As it is, you're not renaming your cookies, so when you've got cookies Zero, One, Two and Three, and delete Two, you're left with Zero, One and Three. Of course, to change Three into Two, you'll need to read the contents of Three, set Two with those same contents, and delete Three by setting it to have already expired. You'll have a situation where the item being reindexed is listed twice, for a while.

If you used a single cookie containing an array of cart items, instead of an array of cookies, you could use all of PHP's array functions (especially array_values() to repack the elements into consecutive indices).

Your loop could be improved as well - for one thing, drop the confusing double negatives; for another - once you've found something you don't need to keep looking for it.

$item=false;
for ($i=0;$i<$count_cart;$i++)
{	if ($grab_cookie[$i] != "")
	{	$item = true;
		break;
	}
}

if ($item)
{
    $count_current_cookie = count($grab_cookie);
    $count_current_cookie++;
    setcookie("phpcartdata[$count_current_cookie]", $cart_data, time()+300);
}
else
{    setcookie("phpcartdata[0]", $cart_data, time()+300);
}

epp_b

Thanks! That worked (using one cookie, and spliting into array with PHP).