Why would Perl's CGI::cookie be able to set a cookie in IE, but not Firefox?

Question

I have a bit of Perl CGI code which I'm trying to run in the project web space of a SourceForge account. The code is able to set a browser cookie just fine when talking to IE, but the cookie is not set when talking to Firefox. When I test with Apache on "localhost", both browsers work fine. It's only on the remote SourceForge URL that Firefox craps out. A search has turned up dozens of near-duplicate questions, but usually people have the exact opposite problem! (Firefox being fine and IE having the problem) Here is the utility sub I'm calling to set cookies: ``` sub setCookie { my $name = shift; my $value = shift; my $expires = shift; my $path = shift; my $domain = shift; if( !defined( $expires ) ) { $expires = '+4h'; } if( !defined( $path ) ) { $path = '/'; } if( !defined( $domain ) ) { $domain = 'steveperkins.sourceforge.net'; } my $cookie = CGI::cookie( -name => $name, -value => $value, -domain => $domain, -expies => $expires, -path => $path ); $r->header_out('Set-cookie' => $cook…

Accepted Answer

Argh! It turns out the issue is that there is only one cookie in play when running on "localhost", but there are multiple cookies in play when hosted on SourceForge's servers.

If you look at the Firefox request headers cut-n-pasted in the question above, you'll notice that there are several cookie name-value pairs... with each pair separated by semicolons. My code was failing to account for this, so all it saw was one giant mal-formed cookie.

I'm still not 100% sure why it was partially working in IE, and I may revisit this in the future to see if more can be learned. But it's basically a moot point for now. I altered the code to split on semicolons AND then split on equals signs, I'm processing cookies just fine now.

Thanks to everyone for your insight and suggestions! Pierre-Luc, I did give your answer an upvote out of gratitude for all the comments beneath it.

```
    sub getCookie {
    my $cookieName = shift;
    my %headers = $r->headers_in;
    my @keys = keys( %headers );
    foreach my $name ( @keys ) {
        if( $name eq 'Cookie') {
        my @semicolontokens = split( ';', $headers{$name} );
        foreach my $splitname ( @semicolontokens ) {
           $splitname =~ s/^\s+//;
           $splitname =~ s/\s+$//;
           my @pair = split( '=', $splitname );
               if( $pair[0] eq $cookieName ) {
               return $pair[1];
               }
           }
       }
   }
```

Why would Perl's CGI::cookie be able to set a cookie in IE, but not Firefox?

Solution

Problem