Set cookie expiration date to exact time

Question

I'm trying to make cookies expire at an exact time. For example, I wish my cookie to expire everyday at 12:00pm. As I understand you don't choose an expiration date, but a lifetime. Must I do 12pm-time() or something similar? If so, how would I achieve that?

Thank you!

Answer 1

You can easily use strtotime in your case.

$expire = strtotime('today 12pm');
if (time() > $expire) {
    $expire = strtotime('tomorrow 12pm');
}
setcookie('foobar', '1', $expire);

Answer 2

You have to give a timestamp for a cookie lifetime, so you need to find the timestamp of next noon.

$noon = strtotime('noon', time());
if($noon<=time())// Already past, get tomorrow
    $noon = strtotime('Tomorrow noon', time());
setCookie("my_cookie","my_cookie_value",$noon);

Edit: note that the second parametre in strtotime is superfluous as it is time() by default.

Answer 3

In PHP, time() helps you get the current time, then set dates relative to that time.

Cookies take a single point of time as the expiration date, so if you want it to be 12:00 pm, just set it as such, without taking into account the current time, which you don't care about.