Question

This morning I accidentally saw the following snippet code, I was fairly surprised because it work very well.

Don’t look at its logic please, I’m just curious why does the HttpCookieCollection (Request.Cookies in this case) return a string (cookie name) instead of a HttpCookie object in foreach loop. Is it a consistency issue because we normally get HttpCookie object in this collection by index/name?

Thanks,

foreach (string cookieKey in System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Request.Cookies)
{
    HttpCookie tmpCookie = System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Request.Cookies[cookieKey];
    if (tmpCookie != null && tmpCookie["RecentlyVisited"] != null)
    {
       cookie.Add(tmpCookie);
    }
}

Answer 1

It makes more sense to iterate through a collection by the keys. That way you have access to both the keys and can easily access the value by calling System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Request.Cookies[cookieKey];