pr0gr4mm3r — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 15:29:51 +0000

You can use it for whatever you want, but that's what it's used for in this case.

A few things though, you should enclose string indexes in single or double quotes. For example, change $_SESSION[logged] to $_SESSION['logged']. Also, $_SESSION[logged] = "true"; should be $_SESSION[logged] = true; because "true" is a string with quotes, and a boolean without them.

drew22299 — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 15:05:24 +0000

This is abit of a long question but I think I almost understand how to use sessions!

Am I right in guessing that I should set $_SESSION[username] as the one entered in the login textbox and then use the username session variable on all the pages that require the logged in users' information? something like

$query = "SELECT * FROM users WHERE user_name='$user'";
$sql = mysql_query($query);

$sqlinfo = mysql_fetch_array($sql);
$username = $sqlinfo[username];

$_SESSION[username] = $username

I have the following code which is part of the process login script, the logged session variable can't be used for anything other than checking to see if the user is logged in, is that right?

session_start();
session_register(logged);
$_SESSION[logged] = "true";
header("Location: index.php");

pr0gr4mm3r — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 14:16:39 +0000

Cookies and sessions are almost identical when trying to access then in PHP.

For example, to access a saved cookie called 'logged', the variable would be $_COOKIE['logged']. If it was in the session, it would be $_SESSION['logged'].

Personally, I would use the session because then the information is stored on the server and not the user's computer. The only thing that is stored on the user's computer is the session id, or SID.

Assigning information to the session is easy. Just treat $_SESSION like an array and assign variables to it accordingly. The same array will be waiting for you on the next page to be read.

Cookies are set using the setcookie() function.