Re: cookies and carts

On Mon, Dec 07, 2009 at 02:39:28PM -0800, Allen McCabe wrote: > I have a shopping cart type system set up which keeps track of the cart > contents using a SESSION variable, where $_SESSION['cart'][$item_id'] is > equal to the quantity, so the name/value pair is all the information I need. > > But sessions are unreliable on the free server I am currently using for this > website (not my choice), so I had start using cookies because users were > being sporadically logged out, sometimes just on a page refresh. > > I want to find a way to set a cookie to remember the cart items as well, and > I thought setting a cookie for each item/quantity pair was the way to go > until I started trying to figure out how to unset all those cookies if the > user empties their cart. > > Is there any way to set cookies with an array for the name? Intead of > $_COOKIE['item_number'] have $_COOKIE['cart']['item_number'] like > I have the > SESSION? First, don't use multiple cookies; already covered elsewhere. Second, you can serialize/unserialize array data and store it compactly in a cookie. See the serialize() and unserialize() functions on php.net. Paul -- Paul M. Foster