how to unset cookie in PHP?

Question

I need to figure out how to unset this cookie. Everything I tried so far has failed.

This is how I am currently unsetting it and it doesn\'t seem to work.

Answer 1

Set the cookie's expiration date to a time in the past (like one second after epoch, for example).

setcookie("yourCookie", "yourValue", 1);

This will cause the cookie to expire.

1 is used instead of 0, because 0 sets the cookie to expire at the end of the session.

Answer 2

Look at the php manual for information on setcookie

http://php.net/manual/en/function.setcookie.php

These notes should explain the process:

bool setcookie ( string $name [, string $value [, int $expire = 0 [, string $path [, string $domain [, bool $secure = false [, bool $httponly = false ]]]]]] )

Cookies must be deleted with the same parameters as they were set with. If the value argument is an empty string, or FALSE, and all other arguments match a previous call to setcookie, then the cookie with the specified name will be deleted from the remote client. This is internally achieved by setting value to 'deleted' and expiration time to one year in past.

Because setting a cookie with a value of FALSE will try to delete the cookie, you should not use boolean values. Instead, use 0 for FALSE and 1 for TRUE.

Answer 3

The solution to this problem was that the I needed to set the correct path to unset the cookie since I was unsetting it from a different file that I originally set it in.

I found out which path I needed to use for the unset by looking for the cookie inside my browser cookies, and once I found the cookie inside my browser, the path was listed near the cookie. So I then set the path to the cookie like so:

setcookie("user_id", $user_id, time() - 1, "/social_learning/site_pages");

The last parameter is the path. And it worked.

My original setcookie looks like this:

setcookie("user_id", $user_id, time() + 7200, "");

Answer 4

In php manual, you can delete a cookie by setting a expiration date is in the past:

setcookie("key","",time()-3600);

In some case, you should provide path and domain for arguments.

In fact, if you assign a cookie with a empty string, it'll also be unset:

setcookie("key","");

Answer 5

There are few security concerns regarding you code, however to answer your question, to unset a cookie in php, all you need to do is to set expiration time to a time in the past:

setcookie("user_id", "", time()-10, "/");

"loginform.php" is not a valid domain, that might be the problem here.

Answer 6

use this code

  setcookie("CookieName", "", time()-(60*60*24), "/");

works everytime for me in every website