Chapter 17. Cookies
PHP transparently supports HTTP cookies. Cookies are a mechanism
for storing data in the remote browser and thus tracking or
identifying return users. You can set cookies using the setcookie()
or setrawcookie() function. Cookies are part of the HTTP header,
so setcookie() must be called before any output is sent to
the browser. This is the same limitation that header() has.
You can use the output buffering functions to delay the script
output until you have decided whether or not to set any cookies
or send any headers.
Any cookies sent to you from the client will automatically
be turned into a PHP variable just like GET and POST method
data, depending on the register_globals and variables_order
configuration variables. If you wish to assign multiple
values to a single cookie, just add [] to the cookie name.
In PHP 4.1.0 and later, the $_COOKIE auto-global array
will always be set with any cookies sent from the client.
$HTTP_COOKIE_VARS is also set in earlier versions of PHP
when the track_vars configuration variable is set. (This
setting is always on since PHP 4.0.3.)
For more details, including notes on browser bugs, see
the setcookie() and setrawcookie() function.
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