Changing the values of cookies when clicked

hsn

Hello,

I have the following code:

<?php
$flag = true;
if($lang == 'fr') 
{
     $flag = false;
}	
?>		
<a href="<?php
     if(isset($_GET['s']))
         $myURL = $myURL . 's=' . $_GET['s'];
     echo $myURL;
     ?>" onclick="
     if($true)
    {
         $_COOKIE['lang'] = 'fr';
    }
    else
         $_COOKIE['lang'] = 'en';
">

I wanna click on the link such that the language cookies change. But the code above doesn't work!!

Please help me with that.

saraadmin

Don't assign values to the $_COOKIE array; use the set_cookie(name, value) function instead (see docs).

(Also, you've forgotten to put your code for the onclick event inside <? ?> and is it supposed to be 'if ($flag)' rather than 'if ($true)'? ).

hsn

Oh yes you are right, it should be if($flag) and between <?php ?>.
And I used the setcookie function. But didn't work! Nothing changes when I click on this link.

hsn

I tried to put everything in <a href=''.....''> without using onclick. But the error was: cannot modify header etc...

What's that?!

saraadmin

Right, sorry, I've just read this properly.

The onclick event of an HTML element is a clientside event, you can only respond to it with clientside code, e.g. JavaScript.

(Note that you can set client cookies using JavaScript).

If you want to set a cookie for the language using PHP, you'll have to pass the language preference on the query string (using either $GET or $POST) and process it with the PHP script that is linked to by the a tag:

<?php 
$flag = true; 
if($lang == 'fr')  

{ 
     $flag = false; 
}     

?>         

<a href="<?php 
     if(isset($_GET['s'])) 
         $myURL = $myURL . 's=' . $_GET['s'];
     if($true) 
    { 
         $myURL .= '&lang=fr'; 
    } 
    else 
         $myURL .= '&lang=en'; 

 echo $myURL; 
 ?>">

Then the page which receives $myURL can use $GET['lang'] to determine the language and set_cookie('lang', $GET['lang']) to set a cookie for it.

saraadmin

PS. regarding 'cannot modify header': you can't have any output before the set_cookie() function. (read docs for more)

hsn

That was a great help... I'll try your help now and see what happens.

hsn

Everything works fine now except one:

When I click for the first time on the link, nothing happens. The page will reload with the same language settings. For the changes to take effect, I should click another time and then I see that the language was changed!

How can I avoid this?!

saraadmin

Hmm, I'm not sure I have enough information to help you.

What is the format of the URL you use for $myURL? Does it point to the same script as the code we've been looking at?

One thing you might want to do is set a cookie for the language to a default value in the initial script of your site? Maybe?

hsn

$myURL is just the URL of the same page. I used it just to reload the page.
I tried to set a default value at the begining. But this does not solve the situation when user clicks on the link to change to french for example and it will not be changed unless if he clicks again after that the page loads.

saraadmin

When you first load the page do you have the 's' and 'lang' parameters set in the query string?

If you're still using the exact code we've been working on, I'm not sure how well it will work if the 's' parameter is not set.

Can you tell us any more about the 's' parameter? Would it benefit from a more descriptive name?

hsn

		
$flag = true;
		if($lang == 'fr') 
		{
		   $flag = false;
		}	
		?>
		<a href="<?php    

		if(isset($_GET['s']))
		   $myURL = $myURL . '?s=' . $_GET['s'] . '&';
		else
		   $myURL .= '?';
		if($flag)
		{
			$myURL .= 'lang=fr';
		}
		else {
			$myURL .= 'lang=en';
		}
		echo $myURL;
		?>">

This is the code I used to make sure that if s was not set, nothing happens. s is not so important for this code, it means section, it just goes through some different sections if there are some.

It's really strange!!

saraadmin

it may just be a typo, but I'm not sure that its going to like:

else
    $myURL .= '?';

replace it with

else
    $myURL = '?';

hsn

Oh right, I'll fix the typo..
But assume that s works fine... still I have the same problem.

saraadmin

So what is the value of $lang when the page first loads? Is it supposed to be taken from the query string or have you set it somehwere in the script before the bit of code we're looking at?

If it doesn't have a value to start off with then $flag will be true and 'lang=fr' will be appended to the href value ($myURL).

(You may want to consider coding this more like:

<a href="<?= '?' . (($_GET['s'] != '') ? 's=' . $_GET['s'] . '&' : '') . 'lang=$lang' ?>">