Detecting a cookie set using setcookie without a page reload - php

Question

I am maintaining the code for an eCommerce website, they use a highly modified version of osCommerce v2.2 RC2. Was noticing an issue where the session isn't started for a new user until they visit the 2nd page of the site.
Looking at the code, before starting the session, it tries to set a cookie. If it detects the cookie it starts the session. Something along this line:
setcookie('cookie_test', 'please_accept_for_session', time()+60*60*24*30, $cookie_path, $cookie_domain);
if (isset($_COOKIE['cookie_test'])) {
session_start();
...
I found an article here that talks about a situation like this, it states:
The first time you only tell the browser to set the cookie, at the time, there is no cookie data in the request header (which could get from $_COOKIE).
Which explains why it takes two page loads for the session to be started. One to set the cookie and one to get notification from the browser that the cookie is set.
My question is, is there anyway around having to go through two page loads to detect the cookie was successfully set on the users browser?
I found this question that didn't really answer my question completely. The highest voted solution was:
setcookie('uname', $uname, time()+60*30);
$_COOKIE['uname'] = $uname;
Which may make it "work" but it doesn't truely tell me that the script was able to set a cookie successfully.
I also found this question, that suggested accessing the headers_list to find the cookie information like so:
function getcookie($name) {
$cookies = [];
$headers = headers_list();
// see http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6265#section-4.1.1
foreach($headers as $header) {
if (strpos($header, 'Set-Cookie: ') === 0) {
$value = str_replace('&', urlencode('&'), substr($header, 12));
parse_str(current(explode(';', $value, 1)), $pair);
$cookies = array_merge_recursive($cookies, $pair);
}
}
return $cookies[$name];
}
// [...]
setcookie('uname', $uname, time() + 60 * 30);
echo "Cookie value: " . getcookie('uname');
Which, again, doesn't seem to be verifying that the cookie was set successfully. All this appears to do is search the headers being sent to the browser for the cookie value.
The only solution I can think of is to redirect on the first visit after setting the cookie. Is there any other way?

Answer 1

Here is the answer:
<?php
function set_cookie($name, $value) {
if (!isset($_COOKIE[$name]) || ($_COOKIE[$name] != $value)) {
$_COOKIE[$name] = $value;
}
setcookie($name, $value, strtotime('+1 week'), '/');
}
// Usage:
set_cookie('username', 'ABC'); //Modify the value to see the change
echo $_COOKIE['username'];