setcookie to an empty value not working

Question

i have this code im trying to do for a type of cache system so it remembers the city the user has selected. if the user has selected a city it stores it in sessions and cook

Answer 1

You can't set a cookie to most falsy values to indicate falseness of a trit cookie. Only '0' will work. Use that.

Answer 2

Make sure to set your cookie with a negative time:

setcookie($variable, '', -1);

Answer 3

You can set empty value to the cookie by using null pointer as the value

like this:

    setrawcookie('testEmptyCookie', "\x00", time() + 3600, '/');

(tried on php 5.6, 7.2)

Answer 4

PHP's setcookie() doesn't allow you to set cookies with empty values. But you can do that with header()

replace:

setcookie($variable, $value, time() + 31536000);

with:

header('set-cookie: '.rawurlencode($variable).'='.rawurlencode($value).'; max-age=31536000', false);

Answer 5

You can't set a cookie with an empty string as it will delete the cookie.

From the docs:

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.