Setting and Getting Cookies

Rob Pengelly posted this at 19:14 — 19th January 2000.

Joined: Jul 1999

I want to learn how to Set and Receive cookies using Perl. Can someone possibly give me an example of doing this?

Thanks

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Orpheus posted this at 20:37 — 19th January 2000.

They have: 568 posts

Joined: Nov 1999

I think I can do that.

code:

print "Set-Cookie: name=1:3:6:72:23:25:65:23432:324324; expires=Monday, 12-Dec-2000 00:00:00 GMT; path=/DIR; domain=DOMAIN_NAME;";
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
[/code]

DIR is where you put the dir of your web site on the server (http not absoulate path). DOMAIN_NAME is where you put the domain of your server. For instance, if your address was www.linux.com/cookies 
then DIR would be /cookies and DOMAIN_NAME would be www.linux.com  or linux.com. Never put the print "Content-type: text/html\n\n"; before the set cookie line or it will print out the cookie. 

Now to read the cookie.

code:#!/usr/bin/perl
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";

sub getCookies {
	local(@rawCookies) = split (/; /,$ENV{'HTTP_COOKIE'});
	local(%cookies);

	foreach(@rawCookies){
	    ($key, $val) = split (/=/,$_);
	    $cookies{$key} = $val;
	} 

	return %cookies; 
} 

%cookies = &getCookies;
[/code];

if you've ever seen a sub routine for processing forms this looks very familiar. To read the cookies you just type print "$cookies{'COOKIE_NAME'}\n";

Hope that clears it up for you.