issue setting cookies

critical posted this at 20:34 — 3rd February 2003.

Joined: May 2002

Hi,

I'm using a .cgi script written in Perl on a Linux/Apache server to set a cookie.

This is the first time I've ever played around with setting cookies, and I'm having some, but not complete success.

Here's one of my Set-Cookie statements:
$session_id = "4918b9fe1f73d715b494589fe0c38d28";
$action = "main";
print "Set-Cookie:ID=$session_id; action=$action; path=/; expires=Thu, 31-Dec-2003 00:00:00 GMT\n";

Here's the resulting cookie that gets saved to a temporary file on my computer:
ID
4918b9fe1f73d715b494589fe0c38d28
my.domain.com/
1536
143147008
29609777
2033440848
29543362
*

Note that in the above example, ID=$session_id successfully went into the cookie, but that action=$action did not get set in the cookie!!!

Just for kicks, I reversed the order of "ID" and "action" in the set cookie statement and the opposite thing happened: "action" got set and "ID" did not!! (see below)

print "Set-Cookie:action=$action; ID=$session_id; path=/; expires=Thu, 31-Dec-2003 00:00:00 GMT\n";

Here's the resulting cookie that gets saved to a temporary file on my computer:
action
main
my.domain.com/
1536
143147008
29609777
2718318144
29543361
*

In both cases, "path" and "expires" do get set.

Anybody seen anything like this before or have any ideas?

Thanks...

critical posted this at 20:53 — 3rd February 2003.

They have: 46 posts

Joined: May 2002

I think I solved my own problem.

I think I need a separate Set_Cookie statement for each key-value pair. I'm still testing but it looks like that's what it is. Duh.

print "Set-Cookie:ID=$session_id; path=/; expires=Thu, 31-Dec-2003 00:00:00 GMT\n";
print "Set-Cookie:action=$action; path=/; expires=Thu, 31-Dec-2003 00:00:00 GMT\n";

critical posted this at 21:20 — 3rd February 2003.

They have: 46 posts

Joined: May 2002

Nope - that's not working either... When I read the cookie, it's only grabbing the first of the 2 sets... I still need your help...

# GET COOKIE CRUMBS
my %crumbs = "";
if ($ENV{HTTP_COOKIE} ne "") {
my @cookies = split(/;/,$ENV{HTTP_COOKIE});
foreach my $cookie (@cookies) {
my ($name, $value) = split(/=/,$cookie);
$crumbs{$name} = $value;
} # end for
} # end if
&Error(" 1 $crumbs{ID} 2 $crumbs{action}");

Result:
1 9b9df633f4dbb23c5bca988167031ac4
2

Wil posted this at 22:55 — 3rd February 2003.

They have: 601 posts

Joined: Nov 2001

OK. Start off. Please don't roll your own Cookie parser/set routine. Please consider using CGI.pm or any of the Cookie::, CGI::Cookie, modules on the CPAN.

Here's the relevent bit in the CGI.pm docs about cookies.

http://stein.cshl.org/WWW/software/CGI/#cookies

- wil

critical posted this at 14:14 — 4th February 2003.

They have: 46 posts

Joined: May 2002

Thanks for the advice about using an existing module. I'm sure that's the best approach. Unfortunately I don't use CGI.pm and would prefer not to download and install any other modules.

Can anyone help me out with a do-it-yourself reinvent-the-wheel read-more-than-one-cookie code in Perl?

I can set multiple cookies. And my code (above) can successfully read the first one. But it's not reading in additional cookies after the first.

TIA.

Wil posted this at 14:47 — 4th February 2003.

They have: 601 posts

Joined: Nov 2001

CGI.pm comes with Perl. You don't need to download anything.

Reading cookies is an absolute walk in the park, too. Try something like:

my $cookie1 = $query->cookie('cookie1);
my $cookie2 = $query->cookie('cookie2');
...

Can't get any easier than that.

- wil

Wil posted this at 14:50 — 4th February 2003.

They have: 601 posts

Joined: Nov 2001

Let me give you a few more examples.

 use CGI;
 my $query = CGI->new();

sub set_cookie {

 my $cookie = $query->cookie (           
   -name => 'mycookie',           
   -value => 'value',           
   -expires => '+1M',           
   -path => '/',           
   -domain => 'mydomain.com'      	
 );

 print $query->header( -cookie=> $cookie );

}

sub retrieve_cookie {

 my $cookie = $query->cookie('mycookie');

}

Hope that helps.

- wil

critical posted this at 15:00 — 4th February 2003.

They have: 46 posts

Joined: May 2002

Thank you for the examples - I really appreciate them. I do recognize that CGI.pm is available to me and that it is supposed to make many tasks easier and more efficient, but I'm an old dog, and that's a new trick that I'm going to continue to resist using for a while - too many other things to learn...

I did, however, figure this out. The book I got the cookie parsing routine out of had a typo.

Here's the content of $ENV{HTTP_COOKIE}:
ID=16bed70d0bc216db0572bce1bf48dcb9; action=main

So I needed to add a space after the semicolon in my split statement...
---from---
my @cookies = split(/;/,$ENV{HTTP_COOKIE});
---to---
my @cookies = split(/; /,$ENV{HTTP_COOKIE});

I can now read multiple cookies. Thanks again for the help.

ROB posted this at 17:22 — 4th February 2003.

They have: 447 posts

Joined: Oct 1999

if you don't want to use cgi.pm search for "cookie-lib.pl" -- i used it along time ago but i don't recall having any problems. Even if you don't use it the code will help you with your own implementation.

Wil posted this at 09:39 — 5th February 2003.

They have: 601 posts

Joined: Nov 2001

cookie-lib has been replaced with CGI.pm as of Perl 5.x. Please resist using any of the *-lib modules, including cgi-lib.pl. They're outdated and insecure.

- wil