A simple, lightweight jQuery plugin for reading, writing and deleting cookies.

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

<script src="/path/to/jquery.cookie.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.

The plugin can also be loaded as AMD module.

Create session cookie:

$.cookie('the_cookie', 'the_value');

Create expiring cookie, 7 days from then:

$.cookie('the_cookie', 'the_value', { expires: 7 });

Create expiring cookie, valid across entire site:

$.cookie('the_cookie', 'the_value', { expires: 7, path: '/' });

Read cookie:

$.cookie('the_cookie'); // => "the_value"
$.cookie('not_existing'); // => undefined

Read all available cookies:

$.cookie(); // => { "the_cookie": "the_value", "...remaining": "cookies" }

Delete cookie:

// Returns true when cookie was found, false when no cookie was found...
$.removeCookie('the_cookie');

// Same path as when the cookie was written...
$.removeCookie('the_cookie', { path: '/' });

Note: when deleting a cookie, you must pass the exact same path, domain and secure options that were used to set the cookie, unless you're relying on the default options that is.

By default the cookie value is encoded/decoded when writing/reading, using encodeURIComponent/decodeURIComponent. Bypass this by setting raw to true:

$.cookie.raw = true;

Turn on automatic storage of JSON objects passed as the cookie value. Assumes JSON.stringify and JSON.parse:

$.cookie.json = true;

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

expires: 365

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

path: '/'

Define the path where the cookie is valid. By default the path of the cookie is the path of the page where the cookie was created (standard browser behavior). If you want to make it available for instance across the entire domain use path: '/'. Default: path of page where the cookie was created.

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: 'example.com'

Define the domain where the cookie is valid. Default: domain of page where the cookie was created.

secure: true

If true, the cookie transmission requires a secure protocol (https). Default: false.

Provide a conversion function as optional last argument for reading, in order to change the cookie's value to a different representation on the fly.

Example for parsing a value into a number:

$.cookie('foo', '42');
$.cookie('foo', Number); // => 42

Dealing with cookies that have been encoded using escape (3rd party cookies):

$.cookie.raw = true;
$.cookie('foo', unescape);

You can pass an arbitrary conversion function.

Check out the Contributing Guidelines

Klaus Hartl