Get cookie expiration

Question

Is it possible to read cookie expiration time with php ? When I print_r($_COOKIE) it outputs:

Array
(
    [PHPSESSID] => 0afef6bac83a7db8abd9f87b76838d7f
    [userId] => 1232
    [userEmail] => user@email.com
    [firstName] => user
    [lastName] => user
)

So I think $_COOKIE don't have the expiration time, is it possible with some other function?

Answer 1

Only name and value are sent to the server so no other cookie data is available.

You can simply re-set the cookie if you want to extend its duration - that's just a few bytes more in the response so it doesn't matter at all.

Answer 2

no, there is no way.
Browser uses cookie parameters (path, expiration etc) only to determine to send a cookie or not, but none of these parameters being sent back to server.

don't think of a cookie as of a $_SESSON array member but as an HTTP header. That's always helps.

Answer 3

Or you can use the function time() on the value of the cookie, that way you need only one cookie and can retrieve data. The php code would look like this:

setCookie('cookiename', time(), time() + 86400);

That way, you'll have the cookie expiring in one day, and by retrieving it's value you can discover when it'll expire with something like this:

86400 - (time() - $_COOKIE['cookiename']);