Retrieving and Setting HTTP Cookies

Perl Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples

∟Retrieving and Setting HTTP Cookies

This section provides a tutorial example on how to retrieve cookies from the HTTP request header and set cookies to the HTTP response header. Cookie objects are created with the CGI::Cookie class.

Here is a simple example Perl CGI script: CGI-pm-Manage-Cookies.pl, to test the CGI::Cookie class:

#!c:/local/perl/bin/perl.exe
#- CGI-pm-Manage-Cookies.pl
#- Copyright (c) HerongYang.com. All Rights Reserved.

   use CGI;
   use CGI::Cookie;

   $query = CGI->new();

#- Retrieving old cookies from the incoming request
   $text = "";
   @cookies = $query->cookie();
   $text .= (scalar @cookies).' Cookies received from request:'."\n";

   $count = 0;
   foreach $name (@cookies) {
      $count++;
      $text .= '   '.$name.' = '.$query->cookie($name)."\n";
   }

#- Creating new cookies
   $count++;
   $cookie1 = CGI::Cookie->new(-name=>'Chocolate_'.$count,
      -value=>'Another chocolate cookie for you!');
   $count++;
   $cookie2 = CGI::Cookie->new(-name=>'Sugar_'.$count,
      -value=>'Another sugar cookie for you!');

#- Setting new cookies to the outgoing response
   print $query->header(-cookie=>[$cookie1, $cookie2]);
   print $query->start_html(-title=>'CGI-pm-Manage-Cookies.pl');
   print $query->pre($text);
   print $query->end_html();

Copy CGI-pm-Manage-Cookies.pl to C:\local\apache\htdocs and browse to: http://localhost/CGI-pm-Manage-Cookies.pl

The script will return 2 new cookies in the response header. But it will not return any cookie information on the page, because the browser didn't send any cookies to the server in the first request.

0 Cookies received from request:

If you refresh the browser, you should see 2 cookies on the page, because the browser sent 2 cookies received in the first response in the second request.

2 Cookies received from request:
   Sugar_2 = Another sugar cookie for you!
   Chocolate_1 = Another chocolate cookie for you!

Of course, if you refresh the browser again, you see more cookies showing up on the page, because the script is keep adding 2 new cookies each time it processes a request.