HTTP-COOKIES: clarified and modified layout

HTTP Cookies

 1. Cookie overview

 2. Cookies saved to disk

 3. Cookies with curl the command line tool

 4. Cookies with libcurl

 5. Cookies with javascript

 1. HTTP Cookies

 1.1 Cookie overview

 1.2 Cookies saved to disk

 1.3 Cookies with curl the command line tool

 1.4 Cookies with libcurl

 1.5 Cookies with javascript

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1. Cookie overview

1. HTTP Cookies

  1.1 Cookie overview

  HTTP cookies are pieces of 'name=contents' snippets that a server tells the

  client to hold and then the client sends back those the server on subsequent

  In 2011, RFC6265 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc6265.txt) was finally published

  and details how cookies work within HTTP.

2. Cookies saved to disk

  1.2 Cookies saved to disk

  Netscape once created a file format for storing cookies on disk so that they

  would survive browser restarts. curl adopted that file format to allow

  sharing the cookies with browsers, only to see browsers move away from that

  format. Modern browsers no longer use it, while curl still does.

  The cookie file format stores one cookie per physical line in the file with

  a bunch of associated meta data, each field separated with TAB. That file is

  called the cookiejar in curl terminology.

  The netscape cookie file format stores one cookie per physical line in the

  file with a bunch of associated meta data, each field separated with

  TAB. That file is called the cookiejar in curl terminology.

  When libcurl saves a cookiejar, it creates a file header of its own in which

  there is a URL mention that will link to the web version of this document.

3. Cookies with curl the command line tool

  1.3 Cookies with curl the command line tool

  curl has a full cookie "engine" built in. If you just activate it, you can

  have curl receive and send cookies exactly as mandated in the specs.

    tell curl to start the cookie engine and write cookies to the given file

    after the request(s)

4. Cookies with libcurl

  1.4 Cookies with libcurl

  libcurl options:

  libcurl offers several ways to enable and interface the cookie engine. These

  options are the ones provided by the native API. libcurl bindings may offer

  access to them using other means.

  CURLOPT_COOKIE

    Extract cookie information from the internal cookie storage as a linked

    list.

5. Cookies with javascript

  1.5 Cookies with javascript

  These days a lot of the web is built up by javascript. The webbrowser loads

  complete programs that render the page you see. These javascript programs