cleaned up bug title

Sorry, but your problem does not imply a bug in PHP itself.  For a
list of more appropriate places to ask for help using PHP, please
visit http://www.php.net/support.php as this bug system is not the
appropriate forum for asking support questions.  Due to the volume
of reports we can not explain in detail here why your report is not
a bug.  The support channels will be able to provide an explanation
for you.

Thank you for your interest in PHP.

setcookie() _sets_ cookies, it does not retrieve them.
Use the $_COOKIE autoglobal array.

This is not a support request.

You might say that it's not "in PHP itself", but that's why I set the category to "Documentation problem".

I apologize for my grammar, I was not trying to fetch the value of a cookie, but create one.

I know what setcookie() does, except the API is not fully specified in the documentation. The documentation should specify what value you can pass to setcookie() to get a session cookie (rather than a cookie that expires at a certain date) since it obviously can create session cookies.

by "get" I meant "create" not "retrieve" sorry about the ambiguity there

Quote from the setcookie() docs: "time()+60*60*24*30 will 
set the cookie to expire in 30 days. If not set, the 
cookie will expire at the end of the session (when the 
browser closes)."

Note the "If not set" clause (which is essentially the 
same as passing 0).

If you believe that sentence can be reworded any better 
please share it with us :)

I'd put this in the description:

The Unix timestamp for when the cookie should expire or 0 for a session cookie. (Session cookies should be kept until the browser closes.) Default is 0. See also: time(), mktime()

And kill the second sentence in the example (since it's not an example.)

Also, I think it is unreasonable to assume that people would assume that "not set"ing something would be the same as passing zero. For example, the following two calls produce dramatically different results:

setcookie('foo', 'bar', $tomorrow);
setcookie('foo', 'bar', $tomorrow, 0, 0);

And I know I'm not alone it this. Buried in the comments on the docs page (link in my original post above) is someone asking what to pass in this parameter for a session cookie, and posting that it seemed to work by passing zero. Another post down lower passes false, which apparently also works. But neither of them have any idea if their solution works across different versions of PHP, or if it will continue to be supported.

This bug has been fixed in the documentation's XML sources. Since the
online and downloadable versions of the documentation need some time
to get updated, we would like to ask you to be a bit patient.

Thank you for the report, and for helping us make our documentation better.