[Resolved] Lots of variables in a single cookie?

MastahUK

I have posted a lot of my problem in the general help forum, but now I would specifically like to find out how to manage cookies properly....

Basically, I will have a rating feature on my tutorial pages (maybe others, but it makes no difference to how it works) where users can vote out of 5 on how good it is. I want to disable them being able to keep voting again and again, so the best way would be to use cookies.

I would have no problem in setting a cookie to contain a single variable - and that would be fine if I only had about 3 or 4 different things that could be rated. But I seem to recall hearing that each domain can only store about 4 cookies at a time, so this means I will have to put several variables into a single cookie. I have read several tutorials on this subject, but they all made no sense to me, so I was unable to edit them to suit my needs.

Each page (could be a tutorial page, or other) is assigned a $name_id already, so I would want the cookie to add something relating to this variable after someone has left a rating. Then the next time they go to leave a rating on the same page, I want to read the cookie and find out that they have rated before, and disable the voting process.

Everything else works fine apart from the vote limitations, so I would greatly appreciate any help on this. To see an example of my script so far, go to this test page here:
http://www.retina-fx.com/retina.php?page=testtut

juschillinnow

put all you cookies into an array.

setcookie(my_cookie[choiceone], "value1");
setcookie(my_cookie[choicetwo], "value2");
setcookie(my_cookie[choicethree], "value3");

The if you want to see if the cookie is set just do....

if(isset($HTTP_COOKIE_VARS[my_cookie]))
{
echo "yes";
}

basically the idea is to name the cookie inside a single string (my_cookie) This allows you to easily manage your cookies.

superwormy

serialize() might help.
www.php.net/serialize

You might also consider just storing an ID in the cookie, and pulling the rest of the info server-side from a database based on that ID. Thts probably the better method.

MastahUK

Thanks a lot for your help, but as the 'serialise' thing only added to my confusion, I think I will try the cookies method.......for now at least.

Just one brief question, will having "mycookie['value1'], mycookie['value2'] etc...." store all of this in a single cookie called mycookie? Its just that to me, it seems as though this method creates several different cookies which would be a problem. Bah, I guess you know what you are on about better than I do, I'll have a go at this now.

Thanks again 😃

superwormy

Setting cookies as array elements sets as many cookies as their are array values / keys.

The original cookie spec limits this to 20 cookies per domain name.

You can serialize() an array of values you want to store, which will make a string representation of the array, which you can then send as the value of the cookie.

Later you can pull it back out of the cookie, unserialize() it and use that array.

MastahUK

Ah right, I understand what it does now. I think I had better use that serialise function, as I don't want to be limited to just 20 cookies, each containing only one variable.

I am extremely confused when looking at that serialise code though, so could you please start me off with some code? 😉 It would be great if you could (I assume you understand what I am trying to do...) or else if you don't want to do that, could you just explain to me a little more about the methods of using the serialise function.

It would be a great help 🙂

superwormy

$array_full_of_values_to_store = array (
"fname" => "Keith",
"lname" => "Palmer",
"date" => "2003-08-16",
);

$serialize = serialize ($array_full_of_values_to_store);

setcookie ("your_cookie_name", $serialize);

-------- ON THE NEXT PAGE --------

$array_full_of_data_stored_in_cookie = unserialize ($_COOKIE['your_cookie_name']);

print_r ($array_full_of_data_stored_in_cookie);

MastahUK

I appreciate you taking the time to help me out by posting that code, but I still cannot get it to work.

I decided firstly to just make a working example of the code you gave me, so that it could help me to understand how it works - and I could then modify it to suit my needs. But the unserialise part doesn't seem to work.

Code for 1st page:

<?
$array_full_of_values_to_store = array ( 
"fname" => "Keith", 
"lname" => "Palmer", 
"date" => "2003-08-16", 
); 

$serialize = serialize ($array_full_of_values_to_store); 

setcookie ("your_cookie_name", $serialize);
?>

<html>
<head>

</head>
<body>
<a href="2.php">Next page</a>
</body>
</html>

Code for 2nd page:

<?
$array_full_of_data_stored_in_cookie = unserialize ($_COOKIE['your_cookie_name']); 
?>

<html>
<head>


</head>
<body>
<?
print_r ($array_full_of_data_stored_in_cookie);
echo $array_full_of_data_stored_in_cookie;
echo $_COOKIE['your_cookie_name'];
?>
</body>
</html>

You can view this test in action here to see where the problem is: http://www.retina-fx.com/1.php. For some reason, the second echo of the unaltered cookie displays "a:3:{s:5:\"fname\";s:5:\"Keith\";s:5:\"lname\";s:6:\"Palmer\";s:4:\"date\";s:10:\"2003-08-16\";}" (as it should) but the first echo of the unserialised cookie does not show anything.

And one other question: how can I use the information stored inside the array as variables? I want to do this, because all I will store in my arrays are "$name_id=1", and I want to then search inside the array to find out if $name_id exists in there or not. So my array will hopefully just look like this assuming somebody has left ratings on pages 1, 2 and 4:

1 = 1
2 = 1
4 = 1

Sorry to be a pain in the ass, but how could I go about doing this?

MastahUK

BUMP (from page 2)

I still can't get this to work yet. I have worked out how to use different parts of the array as variables, but I don't know how I can add new parts into the array and update them in the cookie. Can anyone help?

superwormy

Ya nkow.... I just tried it... and for some reason it won't unserialize the value... not sure why...

Maybe a better option for you is just to store a unique ID in the cookie, adn relate that to name / value pairs in a database on the server.

I'll see if I can get this serialize cookie thing to work more too...

MastahUK

Thanks superwormy, I appreciate your help. I just do not have a clue why I cannot unserialise this array after it has been serialised.

I have now been trying just about every other possibility I can find, but none yet have worked. Here is an example code (the page can be viewed here) showing an example of how I would want my actual array to appear, and then a list of results showing all the values of the array (purely experimental). There is no need to post all my script, so here is the part where I define the array:

$array_full_of_values_to_store = array ( 
"rate1" => "voted", 
"rate2" => "voted", 
"rate3" => "voted", 
"rate5" => "voted",
);

And I also have tried to use implode() to turn this array into a string. Here is that peice of code:

$test = $array_full_of_values_to_store;
$string_to_pass = "test[]=" . implode("&test[]=", $test);

Then, on a different page, I use this explode() function to try and rebuild the same array:

$thearray = explode("&", $thecookie);

The output of this can be seen here. This method seems to keep the values of the array (I know this as 'voted' appears where I have echoed the imploded string), but it drops the keys that call these values (rate1, rate2 etc....). Because of this, the results where I have shown all of the new array say that there have been no votes on anything. Is there a way to implode the array, pass it as a string, then explode it and recover the exact same array on a different page?

By the way, if you think it will help to view the full source for these two pages, you can find it here:

http://www.retina-fx.com/1.txt
http://www.retina-fx.com/4.txt

I would really appreciate any help on either this method, or the serialise method that I had previously tried. Thanks!