Using PHP Sessions To Store Information

by Paul Robinson on 10.06.2008 | no comments

Something that most people learning PHP ask me is how do I store information temporarly? Well the answer to the that is by using PHP [...]

Something that most people learning PHP ask me is how do I store information temporarly? Well the answer to the that is by using PHP sessions. So for you lucky people out there here is a quick overview of how to use PHP sessions.

Sessions are, in a nutshell, a way of temporarly storing information in the browser’s memory while a user is browsing your website. If the user leaves your site or the user shuts their browser window, amnesia sets in and it forgets everything, so make sure the info is not important and can be lost without consequence.

Sessions Crash Course

So a simple example could be to welcome a user using their name. Similar to when you are logged in at Amazon.

You would first need to connect and retreive the users information, which you would obviously do at login. Then, also at login, using the session_start() function you can start and store information into a unique session. Something like the following would work just fine:

session_start();

//Database info collection here...

$_SESSION['name'] = $user_name;
//Any more info you want to store. Do not store passwords etc for security reasons...

That’s all there is to it. You must start the session using session_start() before anything is outputted to the browser. That includes HTML, text, chickens, elephants, or even aliens… To use the info on another page just restart the session using the session_start() function again, and then echo out the info as you need it.

So there you go. That was a crash course in PHP sessions. If you have any questions drop me a comment and I’ll try my best to answer them. Also some good news, I’ve managed to find a back-up of the old blog so I’m gonna go through the posts and put them back up.