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How to use Cookies in CGI in Perl?
HTTP protocol is a stateless protocol. But for a commercial website it is required to maintain session information among different pages. For example one user registration ends after transactions which spans through many pages. But how to maintain user's session information across all the web pages?
In many situations, using cookies is the most efficient method of remembering and tracking preferences, purchases, commissions, and other information required for better visitor experience or site statistics.
How It Works
Your server sends some data to the visitor's browser in the form of a cookie. The browser may accept the cookie. If it does, it is stored as a plain text record on the visitor's hard drive. Now, when the visitor arrives at another page on your site, the cookie is available for retrieval. Once retrieved, your server knows/remembers what was stored.
Cookies are a plain text data record of 5 variable-length fields −
- Expires − The date the cookie will expire. If this is blank, the cookie will expire when the visitor quits the browser.
- Domain − The domain name of your site.
- Path − The path to the directory or web page that set the cookie. This may be blank if you want to retrieve the cookie from any directory or page.
- Secure − If this field contains the word "secure" then the cookie may only be retrieved with a secure server. If this field is blank, no such restriction exists.
- Name = Value − Cookies are set and retrviewed in the form of key and value pairs.
Setting up Cookies
It is very easy to send cookies to browser. These cookies will be sent along with the HTTP Header. Assuming you want to set UserID and Password as cookies. So it will be done as follows −
#!/usr/bin/perl print "Set-Cookie:UserID = XYZ;\n"; print "Set-Cookie:Password = XYZ123;\n"; print "Set-Cookie:Expires = Tuesday, 31-Dec-2007 23:12:40 GMT";\n"; print "Set-Cookie:Domain = www.tutorialspoint.com;\n"; print "Set-Cookie:Path = /perl;\n"; print "Content-type:text/html\r\n\r\n"; ...........Rest of the HTML Content goes here....
Here we used Set-Cookie HTTP header to set cookies. It is optional to set cookies attributes like Expires, Domain, and Path. It is important to note that cookies are set before sending magic line "Content-type:text/html\r\n\r\n.
Retrieving Cookies
It is very easy to retrieve all the set cookies. Cookies are stored in CGI environment variable HTTP_COOKIE and they will have following form.
key1 = value1;key2 = value2;key3 = value3....
Here is an example of how to retrieve cookies.
#!/usr/bin/perl
$rcvd_cookies = $ENV{'HTTP_COOKIE'};
@cookies = split /;/, $rcvd_cookies;
foreach $cookie ( @cookies ) {
($key, $val) = split(/=/, $cookie); # splits on the first =.
$key =~ s/^\s+//;
$val =~ s/^\s+//;
$key =~ s/\s+$//;
$val =~ s/\s+$//;
if( $key eq "UserID" ) {
$user_id = $val;
} elsif($key eq "Password") {
$password = $val;
}
}
print "User ID = $user_id\n";
print "Password = $password\n";This will produce the following result, provided above cookies have been set before calling retrieval cookies script.
User ID = XYZ Password = XYZ123
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