Question on Cookies

dh526

Hi, this is my first post here and I'm very new to php, so sorry if I'm making any basic errors...

What I want to do is have a very very simple log in system so that the user types their name in, then it sets a cookie and it is displayed in another page.

What I have so far is:

<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>


Please login
<br>

<form method="post" action="login1.php">

username:<input type="text" name= "username"/>

<br>

<input type="submit" />
</form>

</body>

</html>

login1.php

<html>
<head>
</head>

<body>


<?



$username = $_POST ['username'];
setcookie('username', $username, time()+3600);
echo("<a href="login2.php">LINK</a>"); 

?>


</body>
</html>

and lastly login2.php:

<?

echo $_COOKIE['username'];


?>

What am I doing wrong?? Thank you so so much for any help 🙂 it is much appreciated 🙂

Thanks again 🙂

dh526

Sorry about the misused [ html ] and [ code ] tags :S !

bradgrafelman

Well for one, you shouldn't even see the link to login2.php since you have a parse error in the PHP code. Are you sure the code above is exactly what you're using?

Also, turn on display_errors and set error_reporting to E_ALL. You should be getting an error message about headers already being sent. When you use [man]setcookie/man, PHP has to modify the HTTP headers that get sent from the webserver to the client. This means that you can't have any output before you use setcookie().

dh526

Yeah, that was what I was using. I have played about with it and now it works... What parse error had I made??

And you are correct, I couldn't see the link... 🙁

bradgrafelman

This code:

echo("<a href="login2.php">LINK</a>");

has unescaped double quotes in the middle of a string delimited by double quotes (notice how the color coding is skewed - all of the string should be in red, not parts of it).

Read over this page for more information about strings and how and when quotes need to be escaped: [man]string[/man].