Question

Some application, not written by me, and not in PHP, creates a cookie for the domain www.example.com.

I am trying to replace that cookie. So in PHP I did:

setcookie('mycookie','mydata',time() + 2*7*24*60*60,'/','www.example.com', false);

However the resulting cookie is created for domain: .www.example.com, note the dot "." ahead of the domain.

So it doesn’t replace it, it creates another cookie.
What can I do?

Answer 1

The issue is also adressed here:
https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.setcookie.php

See comment by jah:

If you want to restrict the cookie to a single host, supply the domain parameter as an empty string

You could also try .example.com as the domain. The trailing dot will allow a cookie for all subdomains for example.com and could overwrite the www.-cookie, but I’ll go with the above solution first.