JavaScript: How to Work With Cookies (Part 2)

Saving a Cookie

Use the setCookie JavaScript function to create a cookie and save a value to that cookie. Pass it three things: name, value and expires.

The name is the name of the cookie you set. We will use it also when retrieving the cookie.

The value is the information you want the cookie to save. Cookies don’t like spaces, semi-colons, or commas, so we use the function escape(value) to encode the value. We will “un-escape” the value when retrieving the cookie.

expires is when the cookie will expire (when it is be deleted from the user’s computer). It is optional. If not used, the cookie expires when the user exits.

The expiration date is the only tricky part. We create a new Date object. The expiration date is stored in milliseconds. An expiration date of x days in the future requires converting the x days to milliseconds in order to add them together.

Putting together a basic setCookie function is quite easy.

Now, make the new Date object and set it 30 days ahead:

Remember to close the script tag:

So we can see it work, let’s set our cookie with a button.

We just set a cookie with the name myCookie and the value it is crunchy Here is the HTML for the button and setting the cookie:

Next >> Retrieving a Cookie

Related Links:

Cookie Central -- a site devoted completely to information about cookies.