Set and Get Cookies in PHP

In this post, you will learn how to use or set and get cookies on a web page using the PHP programming language.

Cookies are pieces of content that are stored in a user's web browser. Cookies can enable you to make shopping carts, client groups, and customized destinations. It's not recommended that you store sensitive data in a cookie, but you can store a unique identification string that will coordinate a user with information held safely in a database.

To set a cookie, the setcookie function is called before sending any other content to the browser, because a cookie is actually part of the header information, and the $_COOKIE superglobal variable is used to get the previously set cookie values.

Here, we are taking a login system and implementing cookies to allow persistent logins between single browser sessions.
For this, we are going to create two web pages - set_cookie.php and get_cookie.php.

In set_cookie.php, we have set cookies for the username and password using the setcookie() function.

set_cookie.php

<html>
	<head>
		<title>Set Cookies in PHP</title>
	</head>
	<body>
	<?php
	$username = "test user";
	setcookie('username', $username, time() + 60 * 60 * 24 * 30); // Cookie sets for 30 days
	$password = "test password";
	setcookie('password', $password, time() + 60 * 60 * 24 * 30); // Cookie sets for 30 days
	?>
	<a href="/get_cookie.php">Click here</a> to get cookie values.
	</body>
</html>

In get_cookie.php, we first check the valid cookie values. If they are not, it says "No cookies were set", else it prints a success message.

get_cookie.php

<html>
	<head>
	<title>Get Cookies in PHP</title>
	</head>
	<body>
	<h1>Get Cookies</h1>
	<?php
	if ($_COOKIE['username'] == "" || $_COOKIE['password'] == "")
	{
	?>
	No cookies were set.<br>
	<?php
	}
	else
	{
	?>
	Your cookies were set:<br>
	Username cookie value: <b><?php echo $_COOKIE['username']; ?></b><br>
	Password cookie value: <b><?php echo $_COOKIE['password']; ?></b><br>
	<?php
	}
	?>
	</body>
</html>

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