Learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, and CSS, 2nd Edition

Using Cookies in PHP

A cookie is an item of data that a web server saves to your computer’s hard disk via a web browser. It can contain almost any alphanumeric information (as long as it’s under 4 KB) and can be retrieved from your computer and returned to the server. Common uses include session tracking, maintaining data across multiple visits, holding shopping cart contents, storing login details, and more.

Because of their privacy implications, cookies can be read only from the issuing domain. In other words, if a cookie is issued by, for example, http://www.oreilly.com, it can be retrieved only by a web server using that domain. This prevents other websites from gaining access to details they are not authorized to have.

Due to the way the Internet works, multiple elements on a web page can be embedded from multiple domains, each of which can issue its own cookies. These are referred to as third-party cookies. Most commonly, they are created by advertising companies in order to track users across multiple websites.

Most browsers allow users to turn off cookies for either the current server’s domain, third-party servers, or both. Fortunately, most people who disable cookies do so only for third-party websites.

Cookies are exchanged during the transfer of headers, before the actual HTML of a web page is sent, and it is impossible to send a cookie once any HTML has been transferred. Therefore, careful planning of cookie usage is important. Figure 12-1 illustrates a typical request and ...