can a php $_SESSION variable have numeric id thus : $_SESSION['1234’]

Question

I've been driving myself nuts with this problem.

I'm creating a session id dynamically in order to retain the page state on refresh.

If a page element is clicked, I take the id of the element and pass it to my server side script which creates the session variable:

$_SESSION[$id] = $id; 

Bizarrely, this was working only some of the time, I narrowed it down to the fact that some elements have a purely numeric id and others do not:

if (is_numeric($id))
{
   $_SESSION[$id] = $id;
   $_SESSION['test'] = $id; 

}else{

   $_SESSION[$id] = $id;
};

In the example above only non-numeric session IDs were visible. For example I could echo $_SESSION['test']; with no issue at all.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Top level keys in the $_SESSION can't be numeric, but keys on the deeper level can.

Eg.

$_SESSION['ids'][13] = $foo;
$_SESSION['ids'][666] = $bar;