Why PHP Cookie variable is not saved after closing Chrome

Question

i'm learning to use cookies in PHP. I was expecting that every time i set a cookie, the cookie and all of his variables are stored on the client site so i could use them again next time the user will visit the site. Anyway in the next example (a web application with a sign in option, i use cookies to store a unique string so i could implement "Remember me" option) i can access the id of the stored cookie but the variables data seem lost. Here is example of the code i use and screenshots of what i get.

Setting up a Cookie

 if (isset($_POST['remember_me'])) {
    $token=uniqid($_SESSION['id']);
    $sql="UPDATE users SET token='$token' WHERE id='".$_SESSION['id']."'";
    $conn->query($sql);   
    setcookie("remember_me", $token, time()+30*24*60*60*1000);
}
else{
    setcookie("remember_me","",time()-1000);
} 

User page

On the user page it just simply prints out the $_COOKIE and $_SESSION array.

<?php 
    echo "SESSION: ";
    print_r($_SESSION);
?>
<br>
<?php
    echo "COOKIE: ";
    print_r($_COOKIE);
?>

Process:

• First i delete all the cookies using the advice i found here: how to delete all cookies of my website in php
• Then log inside
  Log in screen
  (this form call a script that execute the code for setting a cookie i gave at the beginning, then redirect to the user-page)
  User page before closing
• Close the browser and open it again directly at the user-page (without executing other scripts
  /localhost/MIAFormApp/script/db/HTML_PROBA/user-page.html.php
  User page after re-opening

What did i get wrong and why the cookies array after re-opening is empty?

EDIT:

The second time i open browser the script for seting the cookie is not executed. I just set the url to go to the user-page.php .
Examp: /localhost/MIAFormApp/script/db/HTML_PROBA/user-page.html.php

Answer 1

Try deleting the else statement in your sample code - meaning go from:

This

if (isset($_POST['remember_me'])) {
    $token=uniqid($_SESSION['id']);
    $sql="UPDATE users SET token='$token' WHERE id='".$_SESSION['id']."'";
    $conn->query($sql);   
    setcookie("remember_me", $token, time()+30*24*60*60*1000);
}
else{
    setcookie("remember_me","",time()-1000);
} 

To this

if (isset($_POST['remember_me'])) {
    $token=uniqid($_SESSION['id']);
    $sql="UPDATE users SET token='$token' WHERE id='".$_SESSION['id']."'";
    $conn->query($sql);   
    setcookie("remember_me", $token, time()+30*24*60*60*1000);
}

When you re-open your browser, the if statement is going to check whether or not the POST variable remember_me was found. The only time that it will be found is when someone logs in because the login form is sending that information on form submit. In every other instance ( such as re-opening the browser), the else statement will be executed which isn't what you want. The reason being that setting an empty value on a cookie will delete said cookie.