Ruby CGI::Cookie raw cookie parsing - ruby

Question

I want to be able to parse raw cookie strings in ruby 1.9.3p194 (2012-04-20 revision 35410) [x86_64-darwin10.8.0].
The CGI::Cookie library looked promising, however, it does not work how I thought it might have.
For example,
CGI::Cookie::parse("ASPSESSIONIDSCDRSRTS=HHALOHOBJGJMLPIANNLDOMCJ; path=/").each_key {|name| p 'Cookie name: ' + name}
Will return:
"Cookie name: ASPSESSIONIDSCDRSRTS"
"Cookie name: path"
What I would like is something like the CGI::new instance works, except you pass it a raw cookie string:
cookie1 = CGI::Cookie::new('name' => 'name',
'value' => ['value1', 'value2', ...],
'path' => 'path', # optional
'domain' => 'domain', # optional
'expires' => Time.now, # optional
'secure' => true # optional
)
name = cookie1.name
values = cookie1.value
path = cookie1.path
domain = cookie1.domain
expires = cookie1.expires
secure = cookie1.secure
What I can't figure out is how to do this eloquently from a raw cookie string.
EDIT ---
The following code is in the ~/.rvm/src/ruby-1.9.3-p194/lib/cgi/cookie.rb file. So it should return as commented below cookies[name] = Cookie::new(name, *values). Which I on't seem to be getting.
# Parse a raw cookie string into a hash of cookie-name=>Cookie
# pairs.
#
# cookies = CGI::Cookie::parse("raw_cookie_string")
# # { "name1" => cookie1, "name2" => cookie2, ... }
#
def Cookie::parse(raw_cookie)
cookies = Hash.new([])
return cookies unless raw_cookie
raw_cookie.split(/[;,]\s?/).each do |pairs|
name, values = pairs.split('=',2)
next unless name and values
name = CGI::unescape(name)
values ||= ""
values = values.split('&').collect{|v| CGI::unescape(v,##accept_charset) }
if cookies.has_key?(name)
values = cookies[name].value + values
end
cookies[name] = Cookie::new(name, *values)
end
cookies
end
EDIT ---
This seems to be a bug in Ruby's CGI::Cookie.parse method. I've opened a bug report on the Ruby bug tracker - https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/7364

Answer 1

I was just having the same problem. CGI::Cookie.new is just not capable to consume what CGI::Cookie::parse produces, they just don't seem to complement each other the way we expected then.
Searching through the gems quickly I found https://github.com/dwaite/cookiejar . It seems this gem tries to do a lot, but least it has code to properly parse raw cookies as we expect it. I didn't try to understand the library because it seems it does so much stuff and I'm actually only concerned about "consuming cookie -> modiyfing it -> produces cookie".
I came up with this quick hack:
require 'cgi'
require 'cookiejar'
# Some sample
raw_cookie = "somecookie=some%7Cvalue; expires=Wed, 02 Apr 2014 13:36:50 GMT; path=/; domain=.somedomain.com"
parts = CookieJar::CookieValidation.parse_set_cookie raw_cookie
# Needs manual unescape
parts[:value] = CGI::unescape(parts[:value])
# Per spec, this name is different
parts[:expires] = parts[:expires_at]
# Remove old ones
parts.delete :expires_at
# CookieJar adds them always, remove
parts.delete :version
# Convert symbol keys to strings for GGI::Cookie
cookie = parts.inject(Hash.new) do |acc, (k,v)|
acc[k.to_s] = v
acc
end
puts CGI::Cookie.new(cookie).to_s
#=> somecookie=some%7Cvalue; domain=.somedomain.com; path=/; expires=Wed, 02 Apr 2014 13:36:50 GMT
I guess that should be a call for a gem which does only one thing with cookies and does it well: being able to parse and generate raw cookie strings. But TBH, the problem domain is probably much more complex then fooling around the way I did.

Answer 2

I haven't used the library, but according to the Ruby docs ( http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib-1.9.3/libdoc/cgi/rdoc/CGI/Cookie.html ) what you're calling |name| in your block is actually a Cookie object.
parse(raw_cookie)
Parse a raw cookie string into a hash of cookie-name=>Cookie pairs.
You're probably just seeing the name printed out as that's what an implicit .to_s will give you on a Cookie.
Try printing name.path or name.value (or any of the accessors of a Cookie object) instead.