Question

Consider I am saving a cookie in my Node.js app where I am using express framework’s cookieParser middleware.

app.use(express.cookieParser());

app.get('/setCookie', function(req, res){
   res.cookie('String_cookieName', 'String_value', { expires: new Date(Date.now() + 18000000), httpOnly: true }); // +5 Hours expiry
});

And while reading them back, I came across two choices:

1. request.cookies['String_cookieName']
2. request.cookies.name

Both will return me the string_value, which I have set for my cookie ('String_cookieName') else if expired undefined will be returned.

But my question is which one is faster/efficient in terms of performance?

Answer 1

The performance is effectively the same, see jsperf.

A lot of the cookies examples use square brackets with the property as a string because often have characters which are not directly accessible using using dot notation.

Example:

cookies['connect.sid']  // OK
cookies.connect.sid     // error