jquery.cookie

A simple, lightweight jQuery plugin for reading, writing and deleting cookies.

Installation

Include script after the jQuery library (unless you are packaging scripts somehow else):

<script src="/path/to/jquery.cookie.js"></script>

Do not include the script directly from GitHub (http://raw.github.com/...). The file is being served as text/plain and as such being blocked in Internet Explorer on Windows 7 for instance (because of the wrong MIME type). Bottom line: GitHub is not a CDN.

Usage

Create session cookie:

$.cookie('the_cookie', 'the_value');

Create expiring cookie, 7 days from then:

$.cookie('the_cookie', 'the_value', { expires: 7 });

Create expiring cookie, valid across entire site:

$.cookie('the_cookie', 'the_value', { expires: 7, path: '/' });

Read cookie:

$.cookie('the_cookie'); // => "the_value"
$.cookie('not_existing'); // => null

Delete cookie:

// Returns true when cookie was found, false when no cookie was found...
$.removeCookie('the_cookie');

// Same path as when the cookie was written...
$.removeCookie('the_cookie', { path: '/' });

Note: when deleting a cookie, you must pass the exact same path, domain and secure options that were used to set the cookie, unless you're relying on the default options that is.

Configuration

raw

By default the cookie value is encoded/decoded when writing/reading, using encodeURIComponent/decodeURIComponent. Bypass this by setting raw to true:

$.cookie.raw = true;

json

Turn on automatic storage of JSON objects passed as the cookie value. Assumes JSON.stringify and JSON.parse:

$.cookie.json = true;

Cookie Options

expires

Cookie attributes can be set globally by setting properties of the $.cookie.defaults object or individually for each call to $.cookie() by passing a plain object to the options argument. Per-call options override the default options.

expires: 365

Define lifetime of the cookie. Value can be a Number which will be interpreted as days from time of creation or a Date object. If omitted, the cookie becomes a session cookie.

path

path: '/'

Define the path where the cookie is valid. By default the path of the cookie is the path of the page where the cookie was created (standard browser behavior). If you want to make it available for instance across the entire domain use path: '/'. Default: path of page where the cookie was created.

Note regarding Internet Explorer:

Due to an obscure bug in the underlying WinINET InternetGetCookie implementation, IE’s document.cookie will not return a cookie if it was set with a path attribute containing a filename.

(From Internet Explorer Cookie Internals (FAQ))

This means one cannot set a path using path: window.location.pathname in case such pathname contains a filename like so: /check.html (or at least, such cookie cannot be read correctly).

domain

domain: 'example.com'

Define the domain where the cookie is valid. Default: domain of page where the cookie was created.

secure

secure: true

If true, the cookie transmission requires a secure protocol (https). Default: false.

Tests

Requires Node. Startup server:

$ node server.js

Open in browser:

$ open http://0.0.0.0:8124/test.html

Development

• Source hosted at GitHub
• Report issues, questions, feature requests on GitHub Issues

Pull requests are very welcome! Make sure your patches are well tested. Please create a topic branch for every separate change you make.

Authors

Klaus Hartl