[thelist] JS: Cookie Madness

liorean liorean at f2o.org
Tue Feb 3 16:33:23 CST 2004


Tom Dell'Aringa wrote:
> So to be clear, you are saying the document.cookie property holds
> thus:
> 
> name1=value1
> name2=value2
> name3=value3

Well, rather "name1=value1;name2=value2;name3=value3", but essentially, yes.

> And that the expiry date, path and domain aren't accessible via JS.
> In other words, the expiry date is for the WHOLE cookie, regardless
> of how many name/value pairs are there? 
> 
> - or - 
> 
> there really is only ONE name/value pair per cookie? (looking at my
> yahoo cookies, that seems to be the case which is why they set 4
> cookies probably) and when you retrieve the cookie, you should ONLY
> get the name/value pair and not the rest of the info?

Well, there is one name/value pair per cookie. The expiry date, the 
path, the host (domain) and whether the server is secure is stored on a 
per-cookie basis. Yes, the thought is that the only information you 
should be able to get is the name/value pair.

> It seems the second one is correct. Having said all that, I still
> need to be able to SET my expiry date, yet my posted line won't do it
> since it thinks the ; is the end of the statement.

Yeah. Unless the newline is inserted by the mail programs on either 
side, you're doing a classical mistake in JavaScript, one that I have 
not seen in so long that I had forgotten about it. You have a newline 
within a string. That is not allowed. (If that's not the problem, I 
don't really know. Have you tried alerting the generated string after 
construction, but before you write it to the cookie, to see that the 
value is correct?)

> document.cookie = cookieName + "=" + escape(cookieValue) + ";
> expires=" + expireDate.toGMTString() + "; path=/;";
> 
> Even though your function was much terser, you seemed to follow the
> same convention (albeit without whitespace). Can I set the expiry
> date AFTER I set the value? 

All should be set in a single string. It should come after the value in 
that string, though.

-- 
liorean <mailto:liorean at user.bip.net>

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