Re: Using sessions to gather visitor information

From: "Vincent Jordan" <vjordan@extendedpop.com>

I am trying to track the users that visit one page on a site. I am having a couple of problems. The time seems to be 5 hours off. I do not have any tables as of yet what I would like to do is only count an ip address as one in a 24 hour period, if more than one visit then update visit count.I have played around with the time using date() and localtime(). Here is what I have sofar. ini_set('display_errors',1); error_reporting(E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE); session_start(); $_SESSION['ip_address'] = $IP; $_SESSION['user_agent'] = $Browser; $_SESSION['host_name'] = $Host; $_SESSION['visit_time'] = $now; $now = localtime(); $now = $now[2] . ":" . $now[1] . ":" . $now[0]; $IP = getenv(REMOTE_ADDR); $Browser = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']; $Host = getHostByName($IP);

How about showing some actual code and giving details on what doesn't work? This code doesn't make sense, as you're calculating $now, $IP, etc after you've assigned them to the session... Basic debugging steps: start printing out variables and ensuring they have a value and it's what you think it should be. Print out your queries before you execute them to look for obvious errors. Turn register_globals OFF.

I have not setup tables yet but I think I will use this: [snip]

time varchar(10) nul

This should be a DATETIME or TIMESTAMP field. [snip]

Once all done how can I properly clean up the session. I have tried the following bur get an error unset($_SESSION); session_destroy(); I tried this with a link to another page and got this error: Warning: session_destroy(): Trying to destroy uninitialized session in /home/content/html/killtest.php on line 5

$_SESSION = array(); will clear the session. If you unset() it, I don't think it's written at the end of the script, so your data remains. session_destroy() then probably fails because $_SESSION is gone or you never called session_start() on the page. ---John Holmes...