Posted by The Eclectic Electric on 10/27/06 15:39

I'm a PHP noob and just thought I'd quickly relay my latest tale of woe. As
an erstwhile professional programmer I like to research/fix things myself
whenever possible, even if this means - as it did today - bashing my
cold-addled head against a brick wall for hours on end. I'm sure everyone
has at least one similar story.

Anyway, yesterday I started to implement sessions on my site. I'd set up a
user on my user database as was very proud when I could log myself in. Then
I set about transferring the data from the user table to session variables
and changing all the places I'd put in temporary hard-coded values. It was
very exciting. Then I tried to login again and that was fine, but when I
hit the main page, it had all gone very badly wrong.

To cut a long story short, I spent the best part of 24 hours (have a cold at
the minute so didn't sleep much) flaggin things and adding things and taking
things away and going through about a ton of online documentation and
problem forums wondering why on Earth no one else had been suffering with my
problem - the session ID was being propagated between pages but the
variables were not. Then suddenly I discovered the problem: I'd become
convinced for some reason that the session global array was $S_SESSION[].
Every supposed session variable on the site was set to this. So it was
always showing up within the same script when I was echoing it (as it's a
valid identifier), but not when new scripts were invoked. I'm now taking
the rest of what's left of the week (about 20 minutes) off!!!

+e

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