Cookie not being set

Question

Could you please help me? My website does not set the following simple cookie. Although some other login scripts does but this one does not work. Thanks

test.php

...

<form action="test2.php" method="post">
        Email: <br />
        <input type="email" name="email" value=""/> <br />
        <input type="submit" name="submit" value="Next"/> 
</form>

...

test2.php

<?php ob_start(); ?>

<?php
// call the header of the page
require('header.html');

// connect to database
require "connect.php";
?>

<?php
    $email = $_POST['email'];

    // set cookie
    $one_hour = time() + 3600;
    $set = setcookie(user_email, $email, $one_hour);

    if($set == TRUE) {
        print '<p> Cookie set</p>';
    } else {
        print '<p> Cookie not set</p>';
    }

// call footer of the page
require('footer.html');
?>

<?php ob_flush(); ?>

After running the above scripts, I get this error:

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /websites/public_html/test2.php:1) in /websites/public_html/test2.php on line 16

Cookie not set

PS: Line 16 on my script is "$set = setcookie(email_noaccount, $email, $hr);"

Do you have to separate php code tag? New line out side the tag is mean `echo '';` before `setcookie` that make error — bitoshi.n, May 19 '12 at 12:36
possible duplicate of [Headers already sent by PHP](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8028957/headers-already-sent-by-php) — mario, May 19 '12 at 12:37
As the warning said, your problem is in line 1, not in line 16. — mario, May 19 '12 at 12:39
Once the headers are sent (e.g. on the output) you cannot modify them anymore. If setting `ob_start()` before all output does not help, I suggest you to check if you are not saving test2.php with UTF-8 BOM. As far as I know Notepad++ has the option to save the file "Without UTF-8 BOM", so that might help. — Tautvidas S, May 19 '12 at 13:07

mack · Accepted Answer · 2012-05-19T12:56:35.587

2

just change above code in following way and try, put ob_start() after require()

<?php
require "connect.php";
require('header.html');
?>
<?php ob_start(); ?>

edited May 19 '12 at 12:56

answered May 19 '12 at 12:37

mack

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered May 19 '12 at 12:35

You're sending content to the output buffer before you need to:

<?php ob_start(); ?>
  <--- right here
<?php
// call the header of the page
require('header.html');

// connect to database
require "connect.php";
?>
  <--- and right here
<?php
    $email = $_POST['email'];

You should get rid of that unnecessary whitespace in the output so you can conduct your server-side processing (including header modification) before building output.

Ideally, you don't want to mix the two. The server-side processing should occur before the output is built, then the output would be built using the results of the processing and sent to the client.

Cookie not being set

2 Answers2