setcookie

mohamad_1978

hi there

im makeing a list in my site .. list of qustions and the users come and answer them
i want to use cookies so the users cant come and answer agane

this is how i do it

$expires = time() + (3600);
setcookie ("do$id",1,"$expires");

where is $id is the number of qustion and $expires is the set the expires date

i have 1 problim

i add 20 qustions now when i asnwer to number 11 there is no problim but when i do it more then 11 i can answer the qustions agane
i dont know how to explane it

lets say i answer from 1 to 11 without anu problim when i answer number 12 the qustion number 1 is open and i can answer it when i answer number 12 and 13 .. number 1 and 2 is open and so on

how i can fix it ? and is there another way to solve it

other qustion is .. about the expiers this line
$expires = time() + (3600);
can anyone explan for how long this cookie will set in the user PC ? and if i want it to stay for month or a year how i can do it ?

waitting for the answer and sorry for my poor english

dalecosp

3600 is a number of seconds, equivalent to one hour. So a day is 86400, and a month (30 days) is 2592000, etc....

As for the other problem, check the value of the $id variable during each transaction for debugging purposes...just a thought!

G'luck,

mohamad_1978

thanks
well i do check and it is work fine i mean for qustion 1 the value i have to put in the cookie is do1 = 1 so it will be
setcookie ("do1",1,"$expires");
and so with the other it is so fine but it is only do for 11 qustions .. is there a max number of cookies ? ? and how to fix it

BuzzLY

Originally posted by mohamad_1978
well i do check and it is work fine...

That may well be, but you do not show us that in your code. You only showed us two lines. My suggestion is to show us a bit more of your code, so that we can see where all of your variables come from.

Have you tried hard coding your cookie values instead of using $id? Do you get the same problem?

dalecosp

Interestingly enough, regarding the "is there a max number of cookies" issue, one poster at php.net says about 20 cookies is all that IE 6 can eat for any given domain...I'd never thought about it, or read about this, before....

mohamad_1978

i think there is max number of cookies ? maybe that why

so i think to put all of the qustion's number in one cookie useing array

i never work with it so i do this as test

setcookie ("do[$id]",1,"$expires");

this line work all the time any of my user answer a qustion .. but it do the same problim

can any one help me ? ?

BuzzLY

http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/98/29/index1a_page8.html?tw=programming

According to that page, you are limited to 20 cookies max. What you may need to do is "overstuff" your cookies -- meaning that multiple data is stored in the same cookie. Each cookie can hold up to 4K of data, so it's usually best to store lots of data in one cookie anyway.

I suggest reading the article that the above page is part of... it's a pretty good tutorial on advanced Javascript, with LOTS of info on cookies.

I also recommend you read the manual on setcookie(). If you create an array, and set the cookie using that array, all the values will be in one cookie. When you retrieve the cookie, all the values will be automatically placed back into an array with the same name as the cookie.

The only caveat here, of course, is that if you have different values that need to expire at different times, they should go into separate cookies.