Cookie path special characters

Question

My application needs to set cookies for specific paths in the application. For example (in php):

setcookie(*cookie_name*,*value*,*date*,"/subpath/subpath/unique_name");
setcookie(*cookie_name*,*value*,*date*,"/subpath/subpath/another unique name");

Oddly enough, the first setcookie works fine. The second doesn't generate an error and when I view my cookies in Firefox the cookie is there with the correct values. However, I can't access it in my code. I believe the whitespaces are causing the trouble but I haven't found any documentation or specs on how cookie paths should be encoded.

Has anyone encountered this problem before? Does anyone know how to deal with special characters in cookie paths?

Answer 1

No access to a webserver atm. You haven't tried one of these?

setcookie(*cookie_name*,*value*,*date*, "/subpath/subpath/another unique name/");
setcookie(*cookie_name*,*value*,*date*, urlencode("/subpath/subpath/another unique name"));
setcookie(*cookie_name*,*value*,*date*, rawurlencode("/subpath/subpath/another unique name"));

I believe different browsers and web servers might treat these differently. I hope you don't have to use whitespace in the url.

Answer 2

What OS and webserver are you running on?

You can try %20 or + encoding spaces, as suggested.

Also, is the path you're trying a real directory, or a rewrite-rule?

Answer 3

I see no problem with spaces in cookies.
Maybe you should check how you read back your value...
My read routine is:

function ReadCookie(name)
{
  name += '=';
  var parts = document.cookie.split(/;\s*/);
  for (var i = 0; i < parts.length; i++)
  {
    var part = parts[i];
    if (part.indexOf(name) == 0)
      return part.substring(name.length)
  }
  return null;
}

Obviously, the only thing you have to encode is semi-colon.