Question

This little PHP snippet is used to set a cookie that lets me determine whether or not a user is logged in. For some reason, after I use the javascript to redirect, none of my cookies are set any more. Any reason why this would be happening?

I may not be giving you enough info so let me know if so.

...some database queries...
<?php 
    $expire=time()+(7 * 24 * 60 * 60);
    $row = mysql_fetch_array($query);
    $email = $row['email'];
    $userinfo['name'] = $name;
    $userinfo['email'] = $email;
    $userinfo = serialize($userinfo);
    setcookie("user", $userinfo, $expire);
    echo '<script type="text/javascript">
        window.location = "../index.php";
    </script>';

?>

Answer 1

Function setcookie returns true or false, depending on whether cookie was set successfully. You could try this to test:

if(!setcookie("user", $userinfo, $expire)) {
    echo 'Could not set cookie!';
}

If this returns false, then Kumar is right. Otherwise there has to be some other reason.

EDIT setcookie can be called with more parameters, like this:

setcookie(name,value,expire,path,domain,secure)

Notice the path and domain values. I have had problems in the past with two different pages not find each other’s cookies because of different paths/domains.

I noticed that You redirect to “../index.php”. Try redirecting to “index.php” and see if the cookies exist there. If yes, then You should use a common “path” variable to set cookies.

From http://www.php.net/setcookie about “path” variable:

The path on the server in which the cookie will be available on. If set to ‘/’, the cookie will be available within the entire domain. If set to ‘/foo/’, the cookie will only be available within the /foo/ directory and all sub-directories such as /foo/bar/ of domain. The default value is the current directory that the cookie is being set in.