scriptNode / Simple Cookie Script

Simple Cookie Script

Novice

Published October 19th, 2008 by Matt Hackett

I often chat with a lot of new JavaScript developers. Many of their questions are really easy and can be answered with single-line responses, such as, "How do you append to an array?"

Easy stuff. What's unfortunate, though, is when the questions are a bit more involved, and these developers have already searched around a bit and found lousy code to read and learn from. The problem is that there's much ancient, awful JavaScript code out there, and when performing simple search queries, these sites come up. My goal is to improve this process.

One common topic is that of cookies. Dealing with cookies is really basic stuff, but hey, that's what the novice category is for. So here's a simple script to assist with managing cookies:

/**
 * Global cookies object to manage cookies
 * @return {Object} The exposed methods
 * @public
 */
var cookies = (function() {

/**
	 * Gets a cookie's value
	 * @param {String} name The name of the cookie to get
	 * @return {String} The cookie's value, or false if it can't find the cookie
	 * @member cookies
	 * @public
	 */
	var get = function(name) {

var cookie = document.cookie,
			end,
			pre = name + '=',
			begin  = cookie.indexOf('; ' + pre);

if (begin == -1) {
			begin = cookie.indexOf(pre);
			if (begin !== 0) return false;
		} else {
			begin += 2;
		}

end = document.cookie.indexOf(';', begin);
		if (end == -1) end = cookie.length;

return decodeURIComponent(cookie.substring(begin + pre.length, end));
		
	};

/**
	 * Removes a cookie that has already been set
	 * @param {String} name The name of the cookie to remove
	 * @param {String} path The path of the cookie to remove
	 * @param {String} domain The domain of the cookie to remove
	 * @member cookies
	 * @public
	 */
	var remove = function(name, path, domain) {

var cookie = name + '=';

if (!get(name)) return;
		if (path) cookie += '; path=' + path;
		if (domain) cookie += '; domain=' + domain;
		cookie += '; expires=Thu, 01-Jan-70 00:00:01 GMT';

document.cookie = cookie;

};

/**
	 * Tells the browser to set a cookie
	 * @param {String} name The name of the cookie to set
	 * @param {String} value The value to set in the cookie
	 * @param {String} expires The date that the cookie expires (must be a valid date string)
	 * @param {String} path The path of the cookie to set
	 * @param {String} domain The domain of the cookie to set
	 * @param {Boolean} secure Whether to make the cookie secure or not
	 * @member cookies
	 * @public
	 */
	var set = function(name, value, expires, path, domain, secure) {

var cookie = name + '=' + encodeURIComponent(value);

if (expires) cookie += '; expires=' + expires.toGMTString();
		if (path) cookie += '; path=' + path;
		if (domain) cookie += '; domain=' + domain;
		if (secure) cookie += '; secure';

document.cookie = cookie;

};

return {
		get : get,
		remove : remove,
		set : set
	};

})();

You can download this script below:

[Download cookies.js] (2,160 bytes)
[Download cookies-min.js] (634 bytes; compressed)

Also, PPK has an in-depth article about cookies. His code examples get the job done, but unfortunately create too many functions in the global scope (which, as we all know, should be avoided).

Read other articles tagged: javascript, script-sunday, tutorials

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