Basic Session Help

[saintp]

I've been programming PHP for a long time now, but I've never used sessions; I've always just used cookies to pass any user information. I tried to wade my way through them on php.net, but didn't get very far; can you recommend any online tutorials that might help me? Thanks.

[lostcarpark]

Sessions used to be tricky because you had to use session_register() to register variables as part of the session.

But now it's easy.

Just put:

session_start();

at the start of any scripts you want to have access to the session variables. After that, you can use:

$SESSION["MySessionVar"] = "This is my session variable.";
echo $SESSION["MySessionVar"];

Basically $_SESSION is a persistent array. You can store values in it, and they will be available for as long as the session remains active (usually about 25 minutes).

One other thing that's useful to know. If you want to kill the session (say for a logout command). Use the following:

session_destroy();

There probably are tutorials, maybe even on this site, but try the above and see how you get on.

Hope this helps,

James