setcookie().. how to retrieve data afterward?

Ive been playing with setcookie() and am stuck with trying to re-pull the infomation I set, I use: setcookie ("user_id", $userid, 1, "", "", 1); to set the cookie and: if(isset( $user_id )){ echo " cookie 'user_id': $user_id\n"; } else echo" no cookie set ...\n"; } to see if its there.. now this is the closest Ive seen anyone else do it and to me it dosnt make much sense at all the code for retrieving.. also it dosnt work.. suprise suprise.. so anyone know how to do this? thanks in advance -Andrew Rose