What is the best practice for storing related values, like article number and quantity, in a session?

When storing related values like article number and quantity in a session, it is best practice to use an associative array to store the values together under a single key. This makes it easier to retrieve and manipulate the related values as needed throughout the session. 

// Start the session
session_start();

// Check if the session variable for related values exists
if (!isset($_SESSION['related_values'])) {
    $_SESSION['related_values'] = array(); // Initialize an empty array
}

// Add new related values to the session
$article_number = 'ABC123';
$quantity = 5;
$_SESSION['related_values'][$article_number] = $quantity;

// Retrieve and use the related values from the session
foreach ($_SESSION['related_values'] as $article_number => $quantity) {
    echo "Article Number: $article_number, Quantity: $quantity <br>";
}

Keywords

PHP session array serialization security

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