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A complete overview of PHP session handler life cycle

The purpose of this document is to provide a complete overview of the PHP session handler life cycle updated to version 7.0 or above. In particular, I want to emphasize what methods and in what order are called when the native PHP functions are used for session management.
I created this document because the information on the web and the official documentation are very superficial on this topic, in particular on what concerns the implementation of a safe and stable session handler.

Cojad

<?php
// copied from python code at https://stackoverflow.com/a/23221582/3103058
function base32_decode($key) {
  // https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.base-convert.php#122221
  $key = strtoupper($key);
  list($t, $b, $r) = array("ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ234567", "", "");
  foreach(str_split($key) as $c)
    $b = $b . sprintf("%05b", strpos($t, $c));
  foreach(str_split($b, 8) as $c)
    $r = $r . chr(bindec($c));