Hi people,

 

I've just been looking into using sessions instead of cookies to store log-in details and although I haven't had the time to implement a log-in script that uses sessions I'm pretty confidant I understand it.

 

There is just one question, which is pretty much irrelevant in practice but I am interested how the server-side session variables are stored? I know they are in a tmp folder on the server but what format are they stored in, is it a plain text file or something else?

 

Any insight would be great

 

Rich.

When you start a session, a sessionid is generated for that user and stored in a cookie on the viewers computer. The session data is saved on the server with the name SESS_ + sessionid

 

I found this article, which is a pretty good and should answer some of the questions you have.

When you start a session, a sessionid is generated for that user and stored in a cookie on the viewers computer. The session data is saved on the server with the name SESS_ + sessionid

 

I found this article, which is a pretty good and should answer some of the questions you have.

 

I see so do you know what the contents of the file 'SESS_ + sessionid' is? Does it literally just contain standard php variables?

I wasn't too sure about that, but I just tried it on localhost. The variables are stored in serialized form, but are plain to read.

E.g. I stored $_SESSION['test'] as "MrBrightside" and the contents of the session file are:

test|s:12:"MrBrightside";

 

Apparently it's not standard serialization, so you can't just use unserialize() to read the values of the session file.

Cheers for that, I haven't had the time to test it myself!

 

Obviously its not necessary to know, but is always interesting!