Extracting keyword information from Google cookie

[MortimerJazz]

Morning all,

 

I hope I'm posting this in the correct section - if not, please feel free to move it.

 

What I'm trying to do is extract keyword information from the Google Analytics cookie and pass it into the header when a click is generated.

 

Having hunted around I understand that I need to extract the utmctr value from the __utmz campaign cookie, which looks like this:

 

 

So here's a short function that I wrote to try and extract the keyword information:

 

function parse_ga_cookie($cookie)
{
    $values = sscanf($cookie, '%d.%d.%d.%d.utmcsr=%[^|]|utmccn=%[^|]|utmcmd=%[^|]|utmctr=%[^|]');
    if (count($values) !==  {

        // return false; trigger_error(...); ... or whatever you like
        throw new InvalidArgumentException("Cookie value '$cookie' does not conform to the __utmz pattern");
    }

    $keys = array('domain', 'timestamp', 'visits', 'sources', 'campaign', 'source', 'medium', 'keyword');

    return array_combine($keys, $values);

}



// Cooookkkkkkiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeee, om nom nom...

$keyword=(parse_ga_cookie($_COOKIE['__utmz']));

 

Unfortunately though when I go to print out the value $keyword I'm just getting the value 'Array'

 

Is anyone able to help me out at all here? I can't see where the problem lies.

 

Thanks a lot for your help ...

[PaulRyan]

Are you using echo $keyword; or print $keyword;?

 

If so try using print_r($keyword); becuase the function is returning an array from the input.

 

Regards, PaulRyan.

[MortimerJazz]

Cheers Paul - I'll give that a shot.

 

[MortimerJazz]

Ok, quick update as this hasn't quite worked.

 

Here's the ammended code (the ammended part is the print_r() function at the end)

 

<?
function parse_ga_cookie($cookie)

{

    $values = sscanf($cookie, '%d.%d.%d.%d.utmcsr=%[^|]|utmccn=%[^|]|utmcmd=%[^|]|utmctr=%[^|]');

    if (count($values) !==  {

        // return false; trigger_error(...); ... or whatever you like

        throw new InvalidArgumentException("Cookie value '$cookie' does not conform to the __utmz pattern");

    }

    $keys = array('domain', 'timestamp', 'visits', 'sources', 'campaign', 'source', 'medium', 'keyword');

    return array_combine($keys, $values);

}



// Cooookkkkkkiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeee, om nom nom...

$keyword=print_r((parse_ga_cookie($_COOKIE['__utmz'])));

?>

 

The output has changed now, but it's still not quite correct. Instead, I'm getting the value '1' in the $keyword variable now. I'm trying to figure out if that's a string or a value from the array.

 

Can anyone help out at all?

 

Cheers,

[Pikachu2000]

See what this gives you

<?php
function parse_ga_cookie($cookie) {
$values = sscanf($cookie, '%d.%d.%d.%d.utmcsr=%[^|]|utmccn=%[^|]|utmcmd=%[^|]|utmctr=%[^|]');
if (count($values) !==  {
	// return false; trigger_error(...); ... or whatever you like
	throw new InvalidArgumentException("Cookie value '$cookie' does not conform to the __utmz pattern");
}
$keys = array('domain', 'timestamp', 'visits', 'sources', 'campaign', 'source', 'medium', 'keyword');
return array_combine($keys, $values);
}
// Cooookkkkkkiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeee, om nom nom...
$keyword = parse_ga_cookie($_COOKIE['__utmz']);
echo '<pre>';
print_r($keyword);
echo '</pre>';
?>

[MortimerJazz]

See what this gives you

 

Ok, now I'm a little confused.

 

This is the print out I get on the screen when the script is run:

 

 

It would seem that I'm not getting any keywords in my array, which I'm pretty sure wasn't happening before ...

[Pikachu2000]

The only changes I made were in how the data the function returns is accessed and displayed, so anything that isn't there now wasn't there before either.

[DavidAM]

I don't think this is correct:

 

$values = sscanf($cookie, '%d.%d.%d.%d.utmcsr=%[^|]|utmccn=%[^|]|utmcmd=%[^|]|utmctr=%[^|]');

 

sscanf() parses a string based on placeholders.  The "%d" placeholders indicate you are looking for integers there - that's fine.  However, "%[^|]" is not a sscanf() placeholder. That looks more like a regular expression, which is not valid in a sscanf() call - well, at least not to my knowledge. You need to either change those, or change the first part and use preg_match().

[MortimerJazz]

Thanks for the response David, but I thought that section of code listed basic wildcard patterns as opposed to Regular Expressions which would be ok for sscanf ()

[DavidAM]

Perhaps my previous post was not entirely correct. I rarely use scanf(), but I use sprintf() frequently. The documentation for sscanf() says that it uses the same format specifiers as sprintf(). And those "wildcard" expressions and not part of the sprintf() specification. However, I have just read through all of the user comments on sscanf() and they indicate that such expressions are usable; although I cannot find any documentation on what these "wildcard" specifiers are or how they are interpreted.

 

If your cookie value is what you showed (earlier) in the image, then the print_r() output indicates that the sscanf() format is not being interpreted as you expect it to be. I don't have an environment here at work to do any testing, but I think the sscanf() specification is the culprit here.

[gr8webdiva]

Hi Mortimer,

 

The code worked fine for me as is. However, I used echo statements to display the data based on the array. Not the most elegant way of writing it, and I could have used an foreach statement to echo them, but I was in a rush and this was easiest for me.

 

 

function parse_ga_cookie($cookie)
{
$values = sscanf($cookie, '%d.%d.%d.%d.utmcsr=%[^|]|utmccn=%[^|]|utmcmd=%[^|]|utmctr=%[^|]');
if (count($values) !==  {

// return false; trigger_error(...); ... or whatever you like
throw new InvalidArgumentException("Cookie value '$cookie' does not conform to the __utmz pattern");
}

$keys = array('domain', 'timestamp', 'visits', 'sources', 'campaign', 'source', 'medium', 'keyword');

return array_combine($keys, $values);

}


// Cooookkkkkkiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeee, om nom nom...

$keyword=(parse_ga_cookie($_COOKIE['__utmz']));

echo 'Domain: ' . $keyword['domain'] . '<br />';
echo 'Timestamp: ' . $keyword['timestamp'] . '<br />';
echo 'Visits: ' . $keyword['visits'] . '<br />';
echo 'Sources: ' . $keyword['sources'] . '<br />';
echo 'Campaign: ' . $keyword['campaign'] . '<br />';
echo 'Source: ' . $keyword['source'] . '<br />';
echo 'Medium: ' . $keyword['medium'] . '<br />';
echo 'Keyword: ' . $keyword['keyword'];

 

Does this help?

[Pikachu2000]

Probably doesn't help much, being that this thread is nearly a year old . . .