Cookie Craziness with IE and Javascript

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cookies javascript

This is a helpful post for my future self (and others) on the peculiarities of http cookies and accessing them from javascript vs server side. Since it took me numerous google searches to find all of the answers I’m putting the useful details here in one place for reference. I assume a basic understanding of browser cookies exists in your head already.

The properties of cookies that matter are key, value, domain, path, and expiration. Cookies are normally set in the HTTP Response header sent by the server. Cookies can also be set in javascript with one catch that adds difficulty when debugging: domain, path, and expiration can be set but not read from javascript. Javascript can only read the key and value.

To delete a cookie, you set the expiration date to something in the past. Setting it to today’s date/time - 2 days is safe, but any time in the past will work.

NOTE: When deleting cookies in Javascript make sure to use the toUTCString() on your date object. IE has issues with some of the toString representations of local timezones, but toUTCString() (or the deprecated toGMTString()) methods will take care of this. If your cookies are not deleting double check the value of your expires string.

Quirksmode has some good example JS code. But if you just want to delete a single cookie, here is my version:

function deleteCookie(name, domain, path) {
var date = new Date();
date.setTime(date.getTime() - 22460601000); //Now - 2 days
var cookie = name + “=; path=” + path + “; domain=” + domain + “; expires=” + date.toUTCString();
document.cookie = cookie;
}


Debugging Hints for IE

While Firefox plays nicely and will easily show you the cookies you are using, IE makes things a little more difficult. Here are two techniques that I used to help see the cookies in IE:

1 - A JS bookmarklet to view the keys/values of cookies for your page

javascript:(function(){x=window.open();cs=document.cookie.split(‘;’);for(c in cs){x.document.write(cs[c]+‘<br>’);}x.document.close();})()


2 - If you need to see the Domain for each cookie, go into Internet Options > Privacy > Advanced and Override the automatic cookie handling to Prompt for 1st and 3rd party cookies. Then IE will ask you to accept each cookie, but will also show you the key/value, Domain, expiration date, and other details for each cookie before you accept. This is very useful client-side since javascript can only give you the key and value information.


Hope this is helpful to someone out there in the future (probably just me)…