Question

Using the jQuery Cookies plugin, I am setting a cookie, the value of which is a number.

$.cookie('xyz_id','1');

I need to use this number to get the index of an element in my HTML.

var $curr = $.cookie('xyz_id'); 
var $el = $('#main li:eq($curr)');

The output of $curr is 1. So why does the typeOf() $curr show as a string instead of a number? My attempts to convert it to a number using parseInt() have failed. Not sure what’s going on….

Answer 1

Quotes make a variable a string:

'1'

However, in this case, cookies are effectively strings:

To read out a cookie you have to treat
document.cookie as a string and search
for certain characters (semicolons,
for instance) and for the cookie name.

http://www.quirksmode.org/js/cookies.html

Instead, do:

$.cookie('xyz_id', 1); // or, really, '1' would be the same

Then, when reading the value back, cast it back to a numeric value using parseInt().

var xyz_id = parseInt($.cookie('xyz_id'));

Which should create a numeric value.

Also, parseInt should work (within reason) for typecasting a number from a string. See:

var i = "1";
alert(typeof i);
i = parseInt(i);
alert(typeof i);

http://jsfiddle.net/CqBw6/