One obvious problem is that | has a special meaning in regexes, and the first argument to split is a regex, not a simple character. So you're going to want to split('\|',$sessionID) instead.

And I don't know what's happening with your cookie, but I think you should unambiguously print out "here is the contents of the session ID cookie: $q->cookie('sessionID')" to see what's in there.

Is it blank, is it undefined, is it whitespace, what is it? You have to figure out what you've really got in there because it seems you've got something.

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“Every bit of code is either naturally related to the problem at hand, or else it's an accidental side effect of the fact that you happened to solve the problem using a digital computer.”
M-J D