Incrmenting a Cookies with PHP (Beginner Question)

Question

I have used sessions before but never cookies. I would like to use cookies for two reasons:
1) it's something new to learn
2) I would like to have the cookie expire in an hour or so (i know in the code example it expires in 40 sec)

I am trying to write a basic if statement that

      if($counter=="1") { //do this second 
} 
        elseif ($counter >="2") { //do this every time after the first and second
} 
        else {// this is the first action as counter is zero
}

Here is the code I'm using to set the cookie:

 // if cookie doesnt exsist, set the default
    if(!isset($_COOKIE["counter_cookie"])) {
        $counter = setcookie("counter_cookie", 0 ,time()+40);

    }

    // increment it
     $counter++;



    // save it
     setcookie("counter_cookie", $counter,time()+40);
     $counter = $_COOKIE["counter_cookie"];

The problem is that the counter will be set from 0 to 1 but won't be set from 1 to 2 and so on. Any help would be great I know this is a really simple stupid question :|

Thanks!

Answer 1

The problem is most likely related to this line:

$counter = setcookie("counter_cookie", 0 ,time()+40);

It appears you are expecting setcookie to return a value, but that isn't going to happen. Instead, setcookie will simply return a boolean true on success and false on failure.

http://php.net/manual/en/function.setcookie.php

You could try rewriting it like this to achieve the desired effect:

if(isset($_COOKIE["counter_cookie"]))
{
  $counter = $_COOKIE["counter_cookie"];
}
else
{
  $counter = 0;
}
$counter++
setcookie("counter_cookie", $counter ,time()+40);