I'm new to this so I think this is the correct place to post this. I have an affiliate program that creates cookies from the referring sites, and when a visitor arrives on my site, the cookies pass through variables which allow the software on my site to track sales (affiliate id, etc).

I'm trying to figure out how to extract the values (such as aff_id) and have this value submitted as a hidden field on a custom form. Any suggestions on how to get started with this. I know how to create hidden form fields, but I'm at a lost with the rest. Also, my site is on php pages. I've been searching but haven't been able to find anything that helps yet.

Your site cannot read cookies created by a different site.

Maybe I understood it wrong. I have affiliate links on other sites put there by our affiliates. We have the affiliate program software located on our site. So when a visitor comes into my site from one of our links, maybe the cookie is created then (by my program). Is this the likely scenario?

I'm assuming the affiliate id is in a cookie when the visitor is browsing our site, because they can purchase at various points and the affiliate commission is still tracked. I also have a code snippet that displays the affiliate id (in the web text) to the visitor anywhere on my website:

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript" src="http://www.mysite.com/partner/display.php"></script>

Taking this into account, is it possible to pull the affiliate id off of this snippet and send it through a hidden form field on the same page? Thanks for any suggestions.

The affiliate ID will probably be sent to your site in the URL eg yoursite.tld?affid=idcode and as you surmise, your site code will read the ID and save it in a cookie with a set lifetime.

http://www.w3schools.com/PHP/php_cookies.asp you need to read out the value and put it into the form field.

Thanks. I went to that page before I ever made this post. I tested it but couldn't make anything out of the printed cookie values. They are several cookies and they were all long strings of text. If the affiliate id was in there, it must have been scrambled. My guess is the affiliate program is able to decode the stuff in the cookie and then somehow translate an affiliate id out if it (which I have no clue how to do).

It would be great if I could do something with that code snippet from my earlier post. It prints the id right out on the page (anywhere on my site), so it seems like there could be a relatively easy way to pull the value out of the snippet to pass through a hidden form field.

I'll keep searching but let me know if anyone has ideas on where to go from here. Thanks.