Using brackets within a cookie name.

Question

Hello!

I'm trying to use brackets within the name of a cookie.

It is supposed to look like this(this is how the browser wants it!):

Name: name[123456].newName
Content: 20

Here is my example:

$cookie = "name[123456].newName=20"

But when I analyze what the browser sees, I get this:

cookie['name'] = Array

And I want:

cookie['name[123456].newName'] = 20

My question is: How should I write the cookies name in a way that the browser understands?

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

Actually, all you have to do is this:

<?php

setcookie('name[123456].newName', 20);

?>

This generates the following header:

Set-Cookie: name[123456].newName=20

... and browsers (well, at least Firefox) seem to handle it just fine.

The issue starts when you want to read the value back. PHP has an otherwise nice feature: whenever it finds an input parameter (get, post, cookie...) with square brackets on its name, it'll build an array from it. So print_r($_COOKIE) displays this:

Array
(
    [name] => Array
        (
            [123456] => 20
        )

)

I'm not aware of any way to disable this feature so you probably need to use string functions and parse the contents of the raw cookie, which can be found at $_SERVER['HTTP_COOKIE']:

name[123456].newName=20

Answer 2

Thank you for your answers.

I'm trying to add this using cURL.

if(isset($cookie)) {
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIE, $cookie);

}

The problem is not the code using cURL. Because I've tried to add other cookies and it works perfectly.

But when I'm using brackets it doens't....

Maybe I could set my own header with php cURL?