Question

I’m trying to generate the text for a persistent cookie in a simple Python web application.

I’m having trouble finding a way to generate the expires field. The text format for the field is somewhat complicated, and I’d rather not write code to generate it myself.

Is there something in Python that will help? I’ve cooked at the docs for cookie and cookielib and they seem to handle a lot of the cookie business, except for generating the expires field

Answer 1

I think you want to do something like this:

import Cookie, datetime, uuid
ck = Cookie.SimpleCookie()

ck['session'] = str(uuid.uuid4())
ck['session']['domain'] = 'foo.com'
ck['session']['path'] = '/'
expires = datetime.datetime.utcnow() + datetime.timedelta(days=30) # expires in 30 days
ck['session']['expires'] = expires.strftime("%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S GMT")

>>> print ck.output()
Set-Cookie: session=9249169b-4c65-4daf-8e64-e46333aa5577; Domain=foo.com; expires=Mon, 01 Aug 2011 07:51:53 GMT; Path=/