How to get cookie's expire time

Putting an encoded json inside the cookie is my favorite method, to get properly formated data out of a cookie. Try that:

$expiry = time() + 12345;
$data = (object) array( "value1" => "just for fun", "value2" => "i'll save whatever I want here" );
$cookieData = (object) array( "data" => $data, "expiry" => $expiry );
setcookie( "cookiename", json_encode( $cookieData ), $expiry );

then when you get your cookie next time:

$cookie = json_decode( $_COOKIE[ "cookiename" ] );

you can simply extract the expiry time, which was inserted as data inside the cookie itself..

$expiry = $cookie->expiry;

and additionally the data which will come out as a usable object :)

$data = $cookie->data;
$value1 = $cookie->data->value1;

etc. I find that to be a much neater way to use cookies, because you can nest as many small objects within other objects as you wish!