JavaScript Cookie

A simple, lightweight JavaScript API for handling cookies

• Works in all browsers
• Accepts any character
• Heavily tested
• Only dependency is js.cookie, which has no dependencies.
• Unobtrusive JSON support
• Supports AMD/CommonJS
• RFC 6265 compliant
• Enable custom decoding
• ~500 bytes gzipped!

If you're viewing this at https://github.com/pboling/js-cookie-calibre, you're reading the documentation for the master branch. View documentation for the latest release (1.0.0).

Build Status Matrix

Installation

Include the script (unless you are packaging scripts somehow else):

<script src="/path/to/js.cookie.calibre.js"></script>

Do not include the script directly from GitHub (http://raw.github.com/...). The file is being served as text/plain and as such being blocked in Internet Explorer on Windows 7 for instance (because of the wrong MIME type). Bottom line: GitHub is not a CDN.

js-cookie supports npm and Bower under the name js-cookie-calibre

It can also be loaded as an AMD or CommonJS module.

Basic Usage

Create a Calibre cookie, valid across the entire site:

Calibre.set('name', 'value');

Create a Calibre cookie that expires 7 days from now, valid across the entire site:

Calibre.set('name', 'value', { expires: 7 });

Create an expiring Calibre cookie, valid to the path of the current page:

Calibre.set('name', 'value', { expires: 7, path: '' });

Read Calibre cookie:

Calibre.get('name'); // => 'value'
Calibre.get('nothing'); // => undefined

Read all visible Calibre cookies (and only Calibre cookies). The following example shows how Cookies (from js.cookie) and Calibre can be used together:

Cookies.set("smell","good");
Calibre.set("smell","bad"); // actually sets "calibre_smell", so does not collide with Cookies' smell key
Calibre.get(); // => { smell: 'bad' }
Calibre.get("smell"); // => 'bad'
Cookies.get(); // => { smell: 'good', calibre_smell: 'bad' }
Cookies.get("smell"); // => 'good'
Cookies.get("calibre_smell"); // => 'bad'

Delete Calibre cookie:

Calibre.remove('name');

Delete a Calibre cookie valid to the path of the current page:

Calibre.set('name', 'value', { path: '' });
Calibre.remove('name'); // fail!
Calibre.remove('name', { path: '' }); // removed!

Delete all Calibre cookies (will not affect non-Calibre cookies!:

Calibre.remove();

IMPORTANT! when deleting a cookie, you must pass the exact same path, domain and secure attributes that were used to set the cookie, unless you're relying on the default attributes.

Namespace conflicts

If there is any danger of a conflict with the namespace Calibre, the noConflict method will allow you to define a new namespace and preserve the original one. This is especially useful when running the script on third party sites e.g. as part of a widget or SDK.

// Assign the js-cookie api to a different variable and restore the original "window.Calibre"
var Calibre2 = Calibre.noConflict();
Calibre2.set('name', 'value');

Note: The .noConflict method is not necessary when using AMD or CommonJS, thus it is not exposed in those environments.

JSON

js-cookie-calibre provides unobstrusive JSON storage for cookies.

When creating a cookie you can pass an Array or Object Literal instead of a string in the value. If you do so, js-cookie will store the string representation of the object according to JSON.stringify:

Calibre.set('name', { foo: 'bar' });

When reading a cookie with the default Calibre.get api, you receive the string representation stored in the cookie:

Calibre.get('name'); // => '{"foo":"bar"}'

Calibre.get(); // => { name: '{"foo":"bar"}' }

When reading a cookie with the Calibre.getJSON api, you receive the parsed representation of the string stored in the cookie according to JSON.parse:

Calibre.getJSON('name'); // => { foo: 'bar' }

Calibre.getJSON(); // => { name: { foo: 'bar' } }

Note: To support IE6-8 you need to include the JSON-js polyfill: https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSON-js

Encoding

This project is RFC 6265 compliant. All special characters that are not allowed in the cookie-name or cookie-value are encoded with each one's UTF-8 Hex equivalent using percent-encoding.
The only character in cookie-name or cookie-value that is allowed and still encoded is the percent % character, it is escaped in order to interpret percent input as literal.
To override the default cookie decoding you need to use a converter.

Cookie Attributes

Cookie attributes defaults can be set globally by setting properties of the Calibre.defaults object or individually for each call to Calibre.set(...) by passing a plain object in the last argument. Per-call attributes override the default attributes.

expires

Define when the cookie will be removed. Value can be a Number which will be interpreted as days from time of creation or a Date instance. If omitted, the cookie becomes a session cookie.

Default: Cookie is removed when the user closes the browser.

Examples:

Calibre.set('name', 'value', { expires: 365 });
Calibre.get('name'); // => 'value'
Calibre.remove('name');

path

A String indicating the path where the cookie is visible.

Default: /

Examples:

Calibre.set('name', 'value', { path: '' });
Calibre.get('name'); // => 'value'
Calibre.remove('name', { path: '' });

Note regarding Internet Explorer:

Due to an obscure bug in the underlying WinINET InternetGetCookie implementation, IE’s document.cookie will not return a cookie if it was set with a path attribute containing a filename.

(From Internet Explorer Cookie Internals (FAQ))

This means one cannot set a path using path: window.location.pathname in case such pathname contains a filename like so: /check.html (or at least, such cookie cannot be read correctly).

domain

A String indicating a valid domain where the cookie is visible.

Default: Domain of the page where the cookie was created.

Examples:

Calibre.set('name', 'value', { domain: 'sub.domain.com' });
Calibre.get('name'); // => undefined (need to read at 'sub.domain.com')

secure

Either true or false, indicating if the cookie transmission requires a secure protocol (https).

Default: No secure protocol requirement.

Examples:

Calibre.set('name', 'value', { secure: true });
Calibre.get('name'); // => 'value'
Calibre.remove('name', { secure: true });

Converter

Create a new instance of the api that overrides the default decoding implementation.
All methods that rely in a proper decoding to work, such as Calibre.remove() and Calibre.get(), will run the converter first for each cookie.
The returning String will be used as the cookie value.

Example from reading one of the cookies that can only be decoded using the escape function:

document.cookie = 'calibre_escaped=%u5317';
document.cookie = 'calibre_default=%E5%8C%97';
var cookies = Calibre.withConverter(function (value, name) {
    if ( name === 'escaped' ) {
        return unescape(value);
    }
});
cookies.get('escaped'); // 北
cookies.get('default'); // 北
cookies.get(); // { escaped: '北', default: '北' }

Example for parsing the value from a cookie generated with PHP's setcookie() method:

// 'cookie+with+space' => 'cookie with space'
Calibre.withConverter(function (value) {
    return value.replace(/\+/g, ' ');
}).get('foo');

Contributing

Check out the Contributing Guidelines

Manual release steps

• Increment the "version" attribute of package.json
• Increment the version number in the src/js.cookie.calibre.js file
• Commit with the message "Release version x.x.x"
• Create version tag in git
• Create a github release and upload the minified file
• Link the documentation of the latest release tag in the README.md
• Commit with the message "Prepare for the next development iteration"
• Release on npm

Authors

• Peter Boling
• Fagner Brack
• And awesome contributors