My logic is thus: setting a cookie is just including a header line with the desired contents of the cookie to the client. However, since the clients' cookies are sent upon request of a page (and before the http header returned by the server), it wouldn't be available upon the first execution of the script. That would explain why you have to try twice before successfully fetching it - once to set the cookie, and once again to retrieve it.

If this is truly the problem, there's really no recourse to having to call the thing twice, whether it's with the cookie-setting and the cookie-fetching being in the same script or different scripts. Or if you can find a way to travel faster than light you can bypass the causality constraints.

If you manage to do the latter with Perl, make sure you post it to CUFP...

If you are reading it in the same script that you set it in (and on that run - it will be available if the script is called again), it will not contain the cookie you set.

Nothing wrong with your initial method of retrieval, as far as i can see.

Look at your cookie header code. any reason why you are setting $cookie twice? See docs - looks like you mis-copied their example that set two cookies.

But in answer to *why* it's not there, you need to look at the cgi.pm module itself. When retrieving cookies, cgi calls CGI::Cookie->fetch, when setting, it returns a cookie object created by CGI::Cookie(@param).

Don't make the mistake of thinking of the $cgi->cookie call as being an object - it's a method, context depending on how it's called.

If you wanted it to work as you expect, you'd need to fix things a little. I suggest you create a %cookie hash and add name value pairs to it and then use an array to send to CGI. EG,

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use CGI;
use CGI::Carp 'fatalsToBrowser';

my $cgi = new CGI;

# grab existing %cookie
my %cookie;
for ($cgi->cookie()) {
  $cookie{$_} = $cgi->cookie($_);
}

# set a couple of cookies;
$cookie{'botLoginName'} = "XXXXX:YYYYY:ZZZZZ";
$cookie{'Other_cookie'}  = 'whatever';

# create cookies for CGI
my @cookies;
for (keys %cookie) {
  push @cookies, $cgi->cookie( -name  => $_,
                               -value => $cookie{$_}
                             );
}

# print amended header
print $cgi->header(-cookie=>[@cookies]),$cgi->start_html(-title=>'Logi
+n');

# use our hash to check "cookie"
if(defined(my $cookieHolder = $cookie{'botLoginName'})){
        print $cgi->h3("Retrieved cookie named botLoginName: $cookieHo
+lder");
}
else{
    print $cgi->h3("No cookie retrieved.");
}

# display all stored
print $cgi->h4('Stored Cookies');

for (keys %cookie) {
  print "$_ = $cookie{$_}".$cgi->br;
}
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But, having said that, it's probably better to write your code so that on first run (or run where username is sent) that you just check the param() rather than cookie()

HTH

cLive ;-)

Ah. Looks like I'm not getting enough sleep either. Allow me to clear up a couple of things about the code I posted for the benefit of everyone trying (very kindly!) to help me out.

First, the reason that I was setting two cookies (actually, the same cookie twice) was that after things didn't work, I was hoping that maybe if I just set the cookie twice I could having to run the whole script twice. I meant to change it back to just a single cookie before I posted the code, but obviously, I forgot. =)

Secondly, the setting code and the fetching code were indeed run in seperate scripts, which were run several seconds apart...i.e. I ran the setting code, took a moment to look at some output, then typed the URL for the fetching script and ran it. So the problem isn't a timing issue. Good call though, to those who suggested that might be it

After working on the code a little more, I found a solution: the setting code works fine the first time IF I don't use CGI::Cookie. Instead I just do:

print"Set-Cookie: botLogin=$username:$trueName:$Hash\n";
print "Content-Type: text/html\n\n";
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Instead of:

my $cookie = $cgi->cookie(
           -name=>'botLogin',
           -value=>"$username:$trueName:$Hash");
print $cgi->header(-cookie=>[$cookie,$cookie]),
$cgi->start_html(-title=>'Login');
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Try as I might, I could never get it to work on the first run using CGI::Cookie. Any thoughts on why?