Get cookie by name

I have a getter to get the value from a cookie.

Now I have 2 cookies by the name shares= and by the name obligations= .

I want to make this getter only to get the values from the obligations cookie.

How do I do this? So the for splits the data into separate values and puts it in an array.

 function getCookie1() {
    // What do I have to add here to look only in the "obligations=" cookie? 
    // Because now it searches all the cookies.

    var elements = document.cookie.split('=');
    var obligations= elements[1].split('%');
    for (var i = 0; i < obligations.length - 1; i++) {
        var tmp = obligations[i].split('$');
        addProduct1(tmp[0], tmp[1], tmp[2], tmp[3]);
    }
 }

Solution 1:

One approach, which avoids iterating over an array, would be:

function getCookie(name) {
  const value = `; ${document.cookie}`;
  const parts = value.split(`; ${name}=`);
  if (parts.length === 2) return parts.pop().split(';').shift();
}

Walkthrough

Splitting a string by token will produce either, an array with one string (same value), in case token does not exist in a string, or an array with two strings , in case token is found in a string .

The first (left) element is string of what was before the token, and the second one (right) is what is string of what was after the token.

(NOTE: in case string starts with a token, first element is an empty string)

Considering that cookies are stored as follows:

"{name}={value}; {name}={value}; ..."

in order to retrieve specific cookie value, we just need to get string that is after "; {name}=" and before next ";". Before we do any processing, we prepend the cookies string with "; ", so that every cookie name, including the first one, is enclosed with "; " and "=":

"; {name}={value}; {name}={value}; ..."

Now, we can first split by "; {name}=", and if token is found in a cookie string (i.e. we have two elements), we will end up with second element being a string that begins with our cookie value. Then we pull that out from an array (i.e. pop), and repeat the same process, but now with ";" as a token, but this time pulling out the left string (i.e. shift) to get the actual token value.

Solution 2:

I would prefer using a single regular expression match on the cookie:

window.getCookie = function(name) {
  var match = document.cookie.match(new RegExp('(^| )' + name + '=([^;]+)'));
  if (match) return match[2];
}

OR Also we are able to use as a function , check below code.

function check_cookie_name(name) 
    {
      var match = document.cookie.match(new RegExp('(^| )' + name + '=([^;]+)'));
      if (match) {
        console.log(match[2]);
      }
      else{
           console.log('--something went wrong---');
      }
   }

Improved thanks to Scott Jungwirth in the comments.

Solution 3:

If you use jQuery I recommend you to use this plugin:

https://github.com/carhartl/jquery-cookie
https://github.com/carhartl/jquery-cookie/blob/master/jquery.cookie.js

<script type="text/javascript"
 src="//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery-cookie/1.4.1/jquery.cookie.min.js">

So you can read cookie like this:

var value = $.cookie("obligations");

Also you can write cookie:

$.cookie('obligations', 'new_value');
$.cookie('obligations', 'new_value', { expires: 14, path: '/' });

Delete cookie:

$.removeCookie('obligations');