Home/ Questions/Q 6156569
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-23T20:38:04+00:00

If I get Chrome to show me document.cookie by going into the console and

  • 0

If I get Chrome to show me document.cookie by going into the console and typing document.cookie; it’ll give me, say:

"name=John; gender=male";

But then if I type in, say, document.cookie = 5; all it does is add 5; to the start of the string, so I get:

"5; name=John; gender=male";

If I try document.cookie = null; then it doesn’t even do anything.

How can this be? It’s a variable, isn’t it? So why isn’t the assignment operator working the way it should? Is it actually just a bit of syntactic sugar rather than a real variable? And if so, what precisely is the sugar covering up?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    document.cookie has very special behavior. As you’ve seen, assigning to it adds (or updates) a cookie (or multiple cookies), rather than replacing all of the cookies. It’s very unusual.

    Read all about it on MDN.

    • 0