Deleting a Session the way that works

[Jason_Batten]

Hey all,

OMG I have just spent like 2 hours trying to work out why FireFox and Opera were not deleting my session. It worked fine in IE7, here is my original code:

session_unset();
setcookie(session_name(), '', time()-36000);
session_destroy();

Anyone see anything wrong with that? I pretty much got that out of a PHP reference book. And another PHP book told me to unset($_SESSION) while the manual says no way in hell to do that! Now here is the code that works:

session_unset();
setcookie(session_name(), '', time()-36000, '/');
session_destroy();

See it? The setcookie function needs to know the name, value, expiration and path parameters. I mean two PHP reference books got this wrong - I haven't checked my third book yet but DAMN! RTFM before you write a book :glare:

Hope this helps someone 😃

[bradgrafelman]

A more generalized way to destroy a session might be:

$cookie = session_get_cookie_params();
setcookie(session_name(), '', time()-36000, $cookie['path']);

or even

setcookie(session_name(), '', time()-36000, $cookie['path'], $cookie['domain'], $cookie['secure'], $cookie['httponly']);

[NogDog]

You might also want to look at the example on the [man]session_destroy[/man] page.