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How to Read and Write multiple Cookie variables

Cookies

How to Read and Write multiple Cookie variables

by  tlhawkins  Posted    (Edited  )
I've noticed many people asking questions about how to do a particular job with cookies. I've found these 2 functions very helpfull and I wanted to pass them on.

I adapted one of these from a book on javascript and I made the other one myself. I hope they work for you.
The idea is to be able to write more then one variable to a cookie and then retrieve them. I added the option of picking your own delimiter for multiple cookie variables because sometimes you may want to save text that has a common delimiter, or you may want to make a 3 demensional array in a cookie by changing the delimiter.

So here are the functions:

Code: 
function readCookie(name,delimit)
{
  if (document.cookie == ')
  {
    return false;
  }
  else
  {
    var fC,lC;
	var mcookie = unescape(document.cookie);
	fC = mcookie.indexOf(name);
	var ph = fC + name.length;
	if ((fC != -1) && (mcookie.charAt(ph) == '='))
	{
	  fC += name.length + 1;
	  lC = mcookie.indexOf(delimit,fC);
	  if (lC == -1) lC = mcookie.length;
	  return unescape(mcookie.substring(fC,lC));
	}
	else
	{
	  return false;
	}
  }
}
function returns false if there was no cookie found with that name.

Here is the write cookie function. It's a little more complicated.

Code: 
function writeCookie(name,value,delimit)
{
  if (document.cookie == ')
  {
    document.cookie = escape( name + "=" + value );
    return false;
  }
  else
  {
    var B4,Af,fC,lC;
	var mcookie = unescape(document.cookie);
	var ncookie;
	fC = mcookie.indexOf(name);
	var ph = fC + name.length;
	if ((fC != -1) && (mcookie.charAt(ph) == '='))
	{
	  B4 = mcookie.substring(0,fC);
	  fC += name.length + 1;
	  lC = mcookie.indexOf(delimit,fC);
	  if (lC == -1) lC = mcookie.length;
	  if (lC == mcookie.length)
	  {
	    ncookie = B4 + name + "=" + value;
	    document.cookie = escape(ncookie);
		return true;
	  }
	  else
	  {	
        Af = mcookie.substring(lC,mcookie.length);
		ncookie = B4 + name + "=" + value + Af;
		document.cookie = escape(ncookie);
		return true;
	  }	
	}
	else
	{
	  ncookie = mcookie + delimit + name + "=" + value;
	  document.cookie = escape(ncookie);
	  return false;
	}
  }
}

I hope these prove usefull to you.
If anyone has improvements on these scripts I would love to hear them.


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