• Is the header the first thing you're printing? It must be absolutely the first. A debugging print will mess up the parsing of the headers.
• Are the headers being printed in more than one place? Most (all?) header printing routines print a blank line at the end, and that terminates the headers.

I'm sorry, I can't post more info about what I did to break it. I have NO IDEA. If I did I could fix it, but I have tried reverting to what I thought was the place where it used to work, and still no luck.

I think we're going to need a bit more information. If this was my code I would telnet into the web server and see what information is being sent back in response to a GET request. The "Set-Cookie" lines should be present. The question then becomes, what is in those lines. Also, in the above example you say that return_cookies returns:

SET per_page=12; path=/; expires=1h keyword_not=cat; path=/; expires=1
+h keyword_or=tree; path=/; expires=1h keyword_combined=tree%20NOT%20c
+at; path=/; expires=1h
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Is this a string it's returning? Or an array of strings? It would be really helpful if you could provide a Data::Dumper output of the return_cookies function. I don't belive the literal SET should be present in the cookie output.

Are you using the CGI::Cookie module to handle your cookies, or did you roll your own?

I have this routine which I use through the app to make cookies for certain things

sub bake {
    
     my $cookie = shift;
     my @args = @_;
     
     use CGI;
    my $query    = new CGI;
    
    # Make a new cookie
     my $new_cookie = $query->cookie(@args);

     # Get the cookies already baked    
    my $cookies = $cookie->param('cookies');

    my @new_cookies; 
    push(@new_cookies, $new_cookie);
    push(@new_cookies, @$cookies) if $cookies;
    $cookie->param('cookies', ¥@new_cookies);
 }
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Then, to retrieve the cookies before I out put:

 sub return_cookies {
    my $cookie     = shift ;
    my $cookies = $cookie->param('cookies');
    $cookie->debug("SET @$cookies") if $cookies;
    return @$cookies if $cookies;
}
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The strange thing is of course, that this particular part worked fine for a day. I did not touch it, but made several changed to the main app. This leads me to believe it is not a problem with the cookie setting/retreiving function, but someplace else. And since &return_cookies returns exactly what I expect, I am totally lost.

I just discovered something strange. I am using CGI::Application so I have various run modes:

sub top {
    my $app = shift;
    
    # Reset the cookies
    
    $app->cookie->bake(-name=>'site', -value=>$app->query->param('site
+'), -expires=>'1h');
    $app->cookie->bake(-name=>'keyword_or', -value=>'', -expires=>'-1h
+');

    $app->param('template', $app->get_template('top.html'));
    
    return ($app->output);
}

sub results {
    my $app = shift;
    
    # Do stuff to the keyword
    &manage_keyword($app) if ($app->query->param('do_search'));
    
    
    
    return ($app->output);
}

sub manage_keyword {
    my $app = shift;

    my $keyword_or  = $app->query->param('keyword_or');
       $keyword_combined ||= $app->query->cookie('keyword_or');
       
....
    $app->cookie->bake(-name=>'keyword_or', -value=>"$keyword_or") if 
+$keyword_or;
.....
}
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For some reason, even though the run_mode is results, the

$app->cookie->bake(-name=>'keyword_or', -value=>'', -expires=>'-1h');
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in run_mode "top" seems to be deleting my cookie. If I comment that out, it works fine. Why the hang is it even paying attention to "top" ?

&manage_keyword($app)

This is just a newbie doubt:

Is it correct to call a sub in this way?

I see that &manage_keyword only gets its usual first parameter.

I have also noticed that you use several variables with very similar names. Does it help?

.{\('v')/}
_`(___)' __________________________

header_add()

    # add or replace the 'type' header
    $webapp->header_add( -type => 'image/png' );

    - or -

    # add an additional cookie
    $webapp->header_add(-cookie=>[$extra_cookie]);

    The header_add() method is used to add one or more headers to the 
+outgoing response headers. The parameters will eventuallly be passed 
+on to the CGI.pm header() method, so refer to the CGI docs for exact 
+usage details.

    Unlike calling header_props(), header_add() will preserve any exis
+ting headers. If a scalar value is passed to header_add() it will rep
+lace the existing value for that key.

    If an array reference is passed as a value to header_add(), values
+ in that array ref will be appended to any existing values values for
+ that key. This is primarily useful for setting an additional cookie 
+after one has already been set.
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Yeah, I wish CGI::Cookie's constructor would error out or something when you try to do something like this. If you change your -expires option to "+1h" it will work as expected. (Notice how it's setting all the expires options to 1h?)