JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, Fourth Edition

Storing Cookies

To associate a transient cookie value with the current document, simply set the cookie property to a string of the form:

               name=value

For example:

document.cookie = "version=" + escape(document.lastModified);

The next time you read the cookie property, the name/value pair you stored is included in the list of cookies for the document. Cookie values may not include semicolons, commas, or whitespace. For this reason, you may want to use the JavaScript escape( ) function to encode the value before storing it in the cookie. If you do this, you’ll have to use the corresponding unescape( ) function when you read the cookie value.

A cookie written as described above lasts for the current web-browsing session but is lost when the user exits the browser. To create a cookie that can last across browser sessions, include an expiration date by setting the expires attribute. You can do this by setting the cookie property to a string of the form:

               name=value; expires=date

When setting an expiration date like this, date should be a date specification in the format written by Date.toGMTString( ) . For example, to create a cookie that persists for a year, you can use code like this:

var nextyear = new Date(  );
nextyear.setFullYear(nextyear.getFullYear(  ) + 1);
document.cookie = "version=" + document.lastModified +
                  "; expires=" + nextyear.toGMTString(  );

Similarly, you can set the path, domain, and secure attributes of a cookie by appending strings of the following format to ...