How to use cookies

The management of cookies in PHP is done by using the statement setcookie, this statement is available since version 3 of PHP.

int setcookie (string Name [, string Value [, int Expire [, string Path [, string Domain [, int Secure]]]]])

Setcookie() defines a cookie that is sent along with the rest of the information from the header. Cookies shall be sent before any html tag; therefore, we shall call one of these statements before any tag <HTML> or <HEAD>. This is a restriction of cookies, not of PHP.

All messages, except name, are optional.

Name. Name of the cookie. If we create a cookie only with its name, the cookie existing in the client under said name will be deleted. We can also replace any argument with an empty string("").
Value. Value to be stored by the cookie in the client.
Expire. The argument expire is an integer argument that indicates the time a cookie will be deleted in the time format returned by the UNIX statements time() and mktime(). Time() + N seconds of duration is generally used to specify the duration of the cookie.
Path. Subdirectory where the cookie has a value.
Domain. Domain where the cookie has a value. If we establish www.domain.com as domain, the cookie is not set for domain.com. Meanwhile, if we establish domain.com as domain, the cookie is set as for domain.com as for www.domain.com.
Secure. The message secure indicates that the cookie will only be set by a secure HTTPS connection.

Example

setcookie("usuario", "Luis", time()+3600,"/","webestilo.com");

In this example, we set a user name cookie that has the value Luis, lasts 1 hour (3600 seconds) valid for the whole domain webestilo.com

What are cookies?