You can manipulate cookies in JavaScript with the document.cookie property. You can set a cookie by assigning this property, and retrieve one by reading its current value. The following statement, for example, sets a new cookie with a minimum number of attributes:

document.cookie = "cookieName=cookieValue";

And the following statement displays the property's value:

alert(document.cookie);

Use the following buttons to experiment with these statements:

The value of document.cookie is a string containing a list of all cookies that are associated with a web page. It consists, that is, of name=value pairs for each cookie that matches the current domain, path, and date. The value of the document.cookie property, for instance, might be the following string:

cookieName1=cookieValue1; cookieName2=cookieValue2

If you want to find a cookie having a specific name, you need to parse the string and find the one matching this name. For your convenience, we provide in the next section a set of useful functions for getting and setting cookies.