Simple Cookie Script: Not recognising Cookie

Thu Apr 8 03:34:41 EDT 2010

On 8 avr, 07:03, Jimbo <nill... at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi I have a simple Python program that assigns a cookie to a web user
> when they open the script the 1st time(in an internet browser). If
> they open the script a second time the script should display the line
> " You have been here 2 times." , if they open the script agai it
> should show on the webpage "You have been here 3 times" and so on.
>
> But for some reason, my program is not assigning or recognising an
> assigned cookie & outputing the line "You have been here x times". I
> have gone over my code for like 2 hours now I cant figure out what is
> going wrong??
>
> Can you help me figure out whats wrong? I have my own cgi server that
> just runs on my machine so its not that its the code to recognise/
> assign a cookie
>
> [code]#!/usr/bin/env python
>
> import Cookie
> import cgi
> import os
>
> HTML_template = """
> <html>
>   <head>
>
>   </head>
>   <body>
>     <p> %s </p>
>   </body>
> </html>
> """
>
> def main():
>
>     # Web Client is new to the site so we need to assign a cookie to
> them
>     cookie = Cookie.SimpleCookie()
>     cookie['SESSIONID'] = '1'
>     code = "No cookie exists. Welcome, this is your first visit."
>
>     if 'HTTP_COOKIE' in os.environ:
>         cookie = Cookie.SimpleCookie(os.environ['HTTP_COOKIE'])
>         # If Web client has been here before
>         if cookie.has_key('SESSIONID'):
>             cookie['SESSIONID'].value = int(cookie['SESSIONID'].value)
> +1
>             code = "You have been here %s times." %
> cookie['SESSIONID'].value
>         else:
>             cookie = Cookie.SimpleCookie()
>             cookie['SESSIONID'] = '1'
>             code = "I Have a cookie, but SESSIONID does not exist"
>
>     print "Content-Type: text/html\n"
>     print HTML_template % code
>
> if __name__ == "__main__":
>     main()
> [/code]

Hi,

You are confusing the cookie sent by the browser to the server - you
get it by os.environ['HTTP_COOKIE'] - and the one sent by the server
to the browser : it it sent in the response headers

You can change method main() like this :

def main():

    # defaut cookie to send if web Client is new to the site
    set_cookie = Cookie.SimpleCookie()
    set_cookie['SESSIONID'] = 1
    code = "No cookie exists. Welcome, this is your first visit."

    if 'HTTP_COOKIE' in os.environ:
        cookie = Cookie.SimpleCookie(os.environ['HTTP_COOKIE'])
        if cookie.has_key('SESSIONID'):
            # web client has been here before : increment number of
visits
            set_cookie['SESSIONID'] = int(cookie['SESSIONID'].value)
+1
            code = "You have been here %s times." %
cookie['SESSIONID'].value
        else:
            code = "I Have a cookie, but SESSIONID does not exist"

    print "Content-Type: text/html"
    print set_cookie.output()   # send cookie to web client
    print
    print HTML_template % code

- Pierre