new session or old?

[eskimo]

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I'm writing a PHP script that will appear on every page of my site. I want to start a new session when a new visitor arrives at the site and output messageA, however if that vistor isn't new and a session already exists I want to output messageB.

So far the only way I can find of determining whether a session has been started or not is by accessing a stored session variable, surely there is more tidy way than this?

session_start();
if($_SESSION['myvarb'])
{
echo "welcome back";
}

else {
echo "first time here";
$_SESSION['myvarb'] = 1;
} 

Any help pointers gratefully recieved.

[futureweb]

We don't even care what its value is becauase we are wild !

session_start();
if(isset($_SESSION['MySession'])){
 // fire message b
echo $messageB;
}else{
// set the session var
$_SESSION['MySession'] = 1;
// then fire message a
echo $messagea;
} 

or the other way

session_start();
if(!isset($_SESSION['MySession'])){
// set the session var
$_SESSION['MySession'] = 1;
// then fire message a
echo $messagea;
}else{
 // fire message b
echo $messageB;
} 

[eskimo]

Hi Futureweb

I was hoping to do it without ever having to access the session variables, but I can't see how it's possible.

I did try using $session_id, but that wouldn't work. Something along these lines:

session_start(); 
if(!$session_id){ 
// set the session var 
$_SESSION['MySession'] = 1; 
// then fire message a 
echo $messagea; 
}else{ 
 // fire message b 
echo $messageB; 
}