Check if a PHP cookie exists and if not set its value

Answer

You can’t according to the PHP manual:

Once the cookies have been set, they can be accessed on the next page load with the $_COOKIE or $HTTP_COOKIE_VARS arrays.

This is because cookies are sent in response headers to the browser and the browser must then send them back with the next request. This is why they are only available on the second page load.

Work around

But you can work around it by also setting $_COOKIE when you call setcookie():

if(!isset($_COOKIE['lg'])) {
    setcookie('lg', 'ro');
    $_COOKIE['lg'] = 'ro';
}
echo $_COOKIE['lg'];