11.17 `Cookie` -- HTTP state management

The Cookie module defines classes for abstracting the concept of cookies, an HTTP state management mechanism. It supports both simplistic string-only cookies, and provides an abstraction for having any serializable data-type as cookie value.

The module formerly strictly applied the parsing rules described in in the RFC 2109 and RFC 2068 specifications. It has since been discovered that MSIE 3.0x doesn't follow the character rules outlined in those specs. As a result, the parsing rules used are a bit less strict.

CookieError: Exception failing because of RFC 2109 invalidity: incorrect attributes, incorrect Set-Cookie header, etc.

BaseCookie ([input]): This class is a dictionary-like object whose keys are strings and whose values are Morsels. Note that upon setting a key to a value, the value is first converted to a Morsel containing the key and the value.
If input is given, it is passed to the load method.

SimpleCookie ([input]): This class derives from BaseCookie and overrides value_decode and value_encode to be the identity and str() respectively.

SerialCookie ([input])

This class derives from BaseCookie and overrides value_decode and value_encode to be the pickle.loads() and pickle.dumps.

Do not use this class. Reading pickled values from a cookie is a security hole, as arbitrary client-code can be run on pickle.loads(). It is supported for backwards compatibility.

SmartCookie ([input]): This class derives from BaseCookie. It overrides value_decode to be pickle.loads() if it is a valid pickle, and otherwise the value itself. It overrides value_encode to be pickle.dumps() unless it is a string, in which case it returns the value itself.
The same security warning from SerialCookie applies here.

See Also:

RFC 2109, HTTP State Management Mechanism: This is the state management specification implemented by this module.

Subsections

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11.17 Cookie -- HTTP state management

11.17 `Cookie` -- HTTP state management