Question

I have a cookie which I’m trying to split. The cookie is in this format:

key = val1,val2,val3 (where each value is separated by commas)

is there a way for me to split this in a loop so that I can directly access val3?

I’ve tried using the explode() function with no success.

for ($i = 0; $i < count($_COOKIE); $i++)
{
    $ind = key($_COOKIE);
    $data = $_COOKIE[$ind];

    //I try and slit the cookie here
    $cookie_temp = explode(",",$_COOKIE[$ind]);

    //Here is where I wanted to display Val3 from the cookie
    print $cookie_temp[2];

    next($_COOKIE);
} 

my code works fine but I then end up with all my Val3 in a large array. For example, my val3’s are numbers and they get put in an array. Can I split this even further?

Answer 1

Assuming you are looping because you have multiple comma-separated cookie key/value groups, use a foreach() instead and with list() you can retrieve the third value with a direct assignment.

foreach ($_COOKIE as $key=>$value) {
  list($v1, $v2, $v3) = explode("," $value);
  echo $v3;
}

If you have only one cookie value to access, there is no need for the loop, and you can directly call explode(",", $_COOKIE['key'])

PHP 5.4 allows array dereferencing, whereby you can directly access the array element off of the explode() call, but this won’t work in earlier PHP versions.

echo explode(",", $_COOKIE['key'])[2];