title: PHP using CURL: is there a way to emulate a cookie instead of saving it to a file?
body: <p>I access a REST api service that utilizes a variable called session_id. The API calls for this to be stored in a cookie and I accomplish this as follows:</p>
  
  <pre><code>$ch = curl_init();    // initialize curl handle
  
          curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url); //set target URL
          curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, TRUE);// allow redirects
          curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, './Cookie.txt');
          curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, './Cookie.txt');
          curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, TRUE); // set POST method
          curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers); //set headers
          curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
          curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, TRUE); //return the headers so we can get session id
          curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, FALSE); //prevent unverified SSL certificate error
          curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE); //prevent unverified SSL ""
  
          $contents = curl_exec($ch);
          curl_close($ch);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Now the problem is this is called many different times by many different users. (so many different cookie files have to be saved) I'd like a way to simply store the session_id in a variable instead of referencing the cookie file. So far all my attempts are rejected by the service. Can anyone suggest methods to store the session id and cookie information without saving it to a file? Note that reading the session id is no problem, it's returned in XML. For some reason passing it back without referencing the actual generated file does not pass security credentials. Any more information as to why this might be would also be helpful. </p>