Question

I’m learning how to work with cookies in Ruby on Rails. All I know is how to set the name and the value of a cookie, but I want to store up to three more fields. So any hints or good tutorials would be appreciated!

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

Cookies by definition consist of a single name / value pair, where both fields are text. You should really be using three separate cookies to store separate values.

cookies["value_1"] = "one"
cookies["value_2"] = "two"
cookies["value_3"] = "three"

If for some reason you can’t or don’t want to have more than one cookie, you can put different values joined with a separator (an arbitrary text like ~~ in the following example):

value_1 = "one"
value_2 = "two"
value_3 = "three"
cookies["multiple_values"] = "#{value_1}~~#{value_2}~~#{value_3}"

But that way, you’ll have to parse the cookie back, retrieving values by splitting the cookie value using your separator text. There’s danger however that one day a proper value will contain your separator and ruin the parsing process.