In my last post, I shared how to write a cookie using JavaScript, but how do we read the cookie to get the information back out and use it?
Basically, JavaScript provides a way we can grab cookies and read through them and pull the information out of them. Let’s look at a function that does just that…
[code lang=”js”]
// Function to read a cookie by the name of the cookie
function readCookie(name) {
// Find the specified cookie and return its value
var searchName = name + "=";
// Use the document cookie property to grab the cookie.
// Cookies are separated by a semi-colon, so use split() method
// to turn cookie into array var cookies = document.cookie.split(‘;’);
// Loop over cookie array
for(var i=0; i < cookies.length; i++) {
// Store each looped over cookie value
var c = cookies[i];
// Loop over the specific cookie entry to see if it is populated
while (c.charAt(0) == ‘ ‘){
// Grab the cookie and use indexOf() to search for the cookie name we passed
c = c.substring(1, c.length);
if (c.indexOf(searchName) == 0){
// If we find our cookie, return it
return c.substring(searchName.length, c.length);
}
}
// If not found, return null
return null;
}
[/code]
We can call this function, pass a name of a cookie to it and it will pull the cookie we want out of the cookie text file.
Happy Coding!
Clay Hess
