Setting cookies with jQuerySetting cookies with jQuery

Posted June 9th, 2009 in Javascript

Setting and clearing cookies with jQuery is really easy (especially when compared with regular Javascript) but it's not included in the jQuery core and requires a plug-in. This post shows how to set, get the value of and clear cookies with jQuery.

The plugin

Download the jQuery cookie plugin here: http://plugins.jquery.com/project/Cookie

Set a cookie

Setting a cookie with jQuery is as simple as this, where we are creating a cookie called "example" with a value of "foo":

$.cookie("example", "foo");

This is a session cookie and will be destroyed when the user exits the browser. To make the same cookie last for e.g. 7 days do this:

$.cookie("example", "foo", { expires: 7 });

The above examples will apply the cookie to the root level. If you wanted to make it apply only to e.g. /admin and make it last 7 days you can do this:

$.cookie("example", "foo", { path: '/admin', expires: 7 });

Get the cookie's value

Getting the cookie's value is also very easy with jQuery. The following would show the value of the "example" cookie in a dialog window:

alert( $.cookie("example") );

Delete the cookie

And finally, to delete a cookie set the value to null. Setting it to e.g. an empty string doesn't remove it; it just clears the value.

$.cookie("example", null);

Looping through the cookies

My next jQuery post will look at how to loop through cookies with jQuery to show all the currently set cookies.

Related posts: