HTTP::Cookies(3)

📦
version 6.110.0 · 12 versions
, in opensuse-leap 16.0

💖 HTTP::Cookies(3) — the cookie jar page, but make it make sense 🍪

okay so bestie, you're looking at HTTP::Cookies(3) — the Perl manual page for cookie jars. yes, an actual jar. for cookies. it's giving grandma's kitchen but the cookies are HTTP headers. let's get into it 💅

✨ NAME ✨

HTTP::Cookies — HTTP cookie jars 🫙🍪

🌸 VERSION 🌸

version 6.11 — she's got a version number, she's official ⭐

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

like, setup time. here's the whole vibe:

use HTTP::Cookies;
$cookie_jar = HTTP::Cookies->new(
  file => "$ENV{'HOME'}/lwp_cookies.dat",
  autosave => 1,
);

use LWP;
my $browser = LWP::UserAgent->new;
$browser->cookie_jar($cookie_jar);

Or — and this is the lowkey iconic part — for an empty and temporary cookie jar:

use LWP;
my $browser = LWP::UserAgent->new;
$browser->cookie_jar( {} );

no file, no saving, just vibes only 💀

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

This class is for objects that represent a "cookie jar" — that is, a database of all the HTTP cookies that a given LWP::UserAgent object knows about. literally a little database of cookies, slay 🍪

Cookies are a general mechanism which server side connections can use to both store and retrieve information on the client side of the connection. For more information about cookies refer to Cookie Spec <http://curl.haxx.se/rfc/cookie_spec.html> and Cookie Central <http://www.cookiecentral.com>. This module also implements the new style cookies described in RFC 2965 <https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2965>. The two variants of cookies are supposed to be able to coexist happily — besties coexisting, we love to see it 🫶

Instances of the class HTTP::Cookies are able to store a collection of Set-Cookie2: and Set-Cookie: headers and are able to use this information to initialize Cookie-headers in HTTP::Request objects. The state of a HTTP::Cookies object can be saved in and restored from files. yes, she persists. main character energy 😌

💀 LIMITATIONS 💀

okay bestie, sit down for this one, it's serious 🚨

This module does not support Public Suffix <https://publicsuffix.org/> encouraged by a more recent standard, RFC 6265 <https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6265>.

This module's shortcomings mean that a malicious Web site can set cookies to track your user agent across all sites under a top level domain. See t/publicsuffix.t in this module's distribution for details.

ngl that's the scary part. read that twice. 🙈

HTTP::CookieJar::LWP supports Public Suffix, but only provides a limited subset of this module's functionality and does not support standards older than RFC 6265.

⭐ METHODS ⭐

The following methods are provided:

The constructor takes hash style parameters. The following parameters are recognized:

file:            name of the file to restore cookies from and save cookies to
autosave:        save during destruction (bool)
ignore_discard:  save even cookies that are requested to be discarded (bool)
hide_cookie2:    do not add Cookie2 header to requests

Future parameters might include (not yet implemented) — so do not go using these yet, they're literally just dreams ✨:

max_cookies               300
max_cookies_per_domain    20
max_cookie_size           4096

no_cookies   list of domain names that we never return cookies to

Returns a hash of the cookies that applies to the given URL. If a domainname is given as argument, then a prefix of https:// is assumed.

If one or more $cookie_key parameters are provided return the given values, or undef if the cookie isn't available. no cookie? undef. that's it. that's the tea ☕

The add_cookie_header() method will set the appropriate Cookie:-header for the HTTP::Request object given as argument. The $request must have a valid url attribute before this method is called. fr fr, set the url first or it's not gonna work 🫠

The extract_cookies() method will look for Set-Cookie: and Set-Cookie2: headers in the HTTP::Response object passed as argument. Any of these headers that are found are used to update the state of the $cookie_jar. she's collecting them. hoarding them. iconic behavior 👑

The set_cookie() method updates the state of the $cookie_jar. The $key, $val, $domain, $port and $path arguments are strings. The $path_spec, $secure, $discard arguments are boolean values. The $maxage value is a number indicating number of seconds that this cookie will live. A value of $maxage <= 0 will delete this cookie. 💀 so, like, negative lifetime = instant death for the cookie.

The $version argument sets the version of the cookie; the default value is 0 ( original Netscape spec ). Setting $version to another value indicates the RFC to which the cookie conforms (e.g. version 1 for RFC 2109). %rest defines various other attributes like "Comment" and "CommentURL".

This method saves the state of the $cookie_jar to a file. The state can then be restored later using the load() method. If a filename is not specified we will use the name specified during construction. If the $ignore_discard value is true (or not specified, but attribute ignore_discard was set at cookie jar construction), then we will even save cookies that are marked to be discarded. generous queen 💅

The default is to save a sequence of "Set-Cookie3" lines. "Set-Cookie3" is a proprietary LWP format, not known to be compatible with any browser. The HTTP::Cookies::Netscape sub-class can be used to save in a format compatible with Netscape.

ok so real talk: that default format is proprietary and not known to be browser-compatible. if you need browser compat, use the sub-class. iykyk 🧠

This method reads the cookies from the file and adds them to the $cookie_jar. The file must be in the format written by the save() method. no random formats, she's picky 🙅

This method empties the $cookie_jar and re-loads the $cookie_jar from the last save file. it's giving "undo my mistakes" 😭

Invoking this method without arguments will empty the whole $cookie_jar. If given a single argument only cookies belonging to that domain will be removed. If given two arguments, cookies belonging to the specified path within that domain are removed. If given three arguments, then the cookie with the specified key, path and domain is removed.

so: zero args = nuke everything, one = domain only, two = domain + path, three = that exact cookie. precision clearing, we stan 🎯

Discard all temporary cookies. Scans for all cookies in the jar with either no expire field or a true "discard" flag. To be called when the user agent shuts down according to RFC 2965. it's the end-of-day cleanup, very responsible of you 🧹

The argument is a subroutine that will be invoked for each cookie stored in the $cookie_jar. The subroutine will be invoked with the following arguments:

  0  version
  1  key
  2  val
  3  path
  4  domain
  5  port
  6  path_spec
  7  secure
  8  expires
  9  discard
 10  hash

eleven things, in that exact order, no cap 🔢

The as_string() method will return the state of the $cookie_jar represented as a sequence of "Set-Cookie3" header lines separated by "\n". If $skip_discardables is TRUE, it will not return lines for cookies with the Discard attribute. a little text dump of your cookie situation 📝

👑 SEE ALSO 👑

HTTP::Cookies::Netscape, HTTP::Cookies::Microsoft

💖 AUTHOR 💖

Gisle Aas <gisle@activestate.com>

This software is copyright (c) 2002 by Gisle Aas.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.

and that's the whole page, bestie 🫶 this came from perl v5.42.0, dated 2024-03-08 — so go forth, jar your cookies, and remember: no Public Suffix support, so stay safe out there 💜✨🎀

📦 where this page comes from