ending certain session variables but leaving others intact

martincrumlish

Hi,

I have a site that uses sessions for 2 things.

1 - logging a user in and maintaining ther elogged in status
2 - storing user entered values across pages

Is there an easy way I can kill all the user entered sessions data but not kill the logged in status session?

I saw this code:

// Unset all of the session variables. 
session_unset(); 
// Finally, destroy the session. 
session_destroy();

but this also kills the logged in status session, Should my sessions have different names and then they can be destroyed by name (at the moment they aren't named and are created with session_start();

Any help is appreciated.

Martin

Shrike

I usually keep session information in arrays, that way i can just do

unset($_SESSION['arrayindex']);
//or
$_SESSION['arrayindex'] = array();

To clear particular data without much effort.

martincrumlish

I was pretty new to sessions when I started this so i have already coded it all using individual session variables as opposed to an array.

Is there a way to destroy all of these and leave the one I want to keep without specifically using session_unregister for each one?

Thanks

Shrike

Something quick and dirty

$importantstuff = array (
  "key1",
  "key2" // etc
);
foreach($_SESSION as $key => $value)
{
  if(!isset($importantstuff[$key]))
  {
    unset($_SESSION[$key]);
    // Depending on your PHP version you might need
    session_unregister($key); // instead
  }
}

martincrumlish

Thanks

by the way, I'm running PHP 4.06. Does $SESSION work for that? I tried doing a print_r($SESSION) earlier and nothing appeared in the output

Shrike

Wow, that's a pretty damn old version 🙂

I think the array is called $HTTP_SESSION_VARS.

martincrumlish

yeah, I've been meaning to upgrade it 🙂