Setting COOKIE questions. Please look!

brianb

Hey people!

Here's a few inquiries about COOKIES, any help, and especially coding examples are greatly appreciated:

I have a PHP page which call enteries from my database via an ID number supplied by the URL string. For instance:

content.php?345

Now, what I'm looking to do is, every time an ID is accessed, the a COUNT is added to a COUNTER in my database, letting me know that someone has visied the page that day.

My goal is to SET A COOKIE when the user visits the page of a certain ID that expires at the end of the day. This allows that user to visit that ID as many times in that day that they care to, and only 1 COUNT will be added to my database.

...Then at the end of the day, the COOKIE expires.

Now, my issue is SETTING the cookie for multiple ID calls...

For instance...

content.php?345
content.php?125
content.php?689

Are all access by one user in a day. How would I make it so that the COOKIE gets set with the first call, then updated as the user accesses other IDs?

Then of course expiring the entire cookie at the end of the day...

ANY HELP IS APPRECIATED!

Thanks.

evan

i believe that cookies expire at a certain date/time so if you keep a constant "tonight 12:00am midnight" to set all your cookies for today, they'll all go away tonight.

have you tried yet just setting the cookie again with the same name? it should overwrite the first one with the new value.

if i remember correctly there is a limit to the number of cookies you can set from one domain, so i'd store all the id's in one cookie and then parse them out when you read the cookie.

hope that helps!

oh here's a link i turned up about the cookie spec:
http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/std/cookie_spec.html

Evan

brianb

Hey,

Thanks for the response.

So, hmmmm.....here's my ida then on how to execite this.

The first call of the day to that page sets the COOKIE.
Then when another call is accessed, it first reads to see if there is a COOKIE present...if so, the it gets the data from that COOKIE, grabs the data from the new page, then RESETS the entire COOKIE with the 2 IDs.

Make sense?

I'm going to beig tinkering now.

Thanks again!

evan

that sounds - about like how i was thinking-

good luck!

Evan