Re: Accessing cookies in required files

In article <20020627082709.78063.qmail@pb1.pair.com> , chris.morrow@btopenworld.com (Chris Morrow) wrote: >Up until now this has worked fine. But now I have a function in the >settings.inc file that tries to read the value of a cookie called >"testcookie". My problem is that the settings.inc file doesn't seem to be >able to access the cookie at all. But if I try to access it direct from a >page rather than the required file it works fine. It has nothing to do with the require and *everything* to do with the FUNCTION. You see, it's a really Bad Idea (tm) to have your functions use variables from the "outside" world -- variables should be passed in as parameters. function foo (parameter, parameter, ..., parameter){ . . . } Inside the function "foo" there are *NO* variables except the "parameter" variables. You can over-ride this, though, using "global" function foo (parameter, parameter, ..., parameter){ global $cookie1; . . . } EXCEPTION: The new-fangled "superglobals" $_POST, $_GET, $_COOKIE etc are global everywhere. So you *could* use $_COOKIE['cookie1'] without using "global". This rule about variable scope is a FEATURE -- Without it, the function is a relatively weak little thing, and you are all to likely to have stupid, stupid, stupid bugs from variable name conflicts and a million lines of PHP code on your web-server to find the mistake... With the rule that only the paramters (and globals) can exist inside a function, you limit your problem search to a very much smaller space. -- Like Music? http://l-i-e.com/artists.htm