Handling cookies

Cookies are frequently used in web applications to store data in browsers. The most frequent use case is user identification.

We are going to implement a very simple and insecure identification system based on cookies to show how to use them.

How to do it...

The http.cookies.SimpleCookie class provides all the facilities required to parse and generate cookies.

1. We can rely on it to create a web application endpoint that will set a cookie:

from web_06 import WSGIApplication

app = WSGIApplication()

import time
from http.cookies import SimpleCookie

@app.route('/identity')
def identity(req, resp):
    identity = int(time.time())

    cookie = SimpleCookie()
    cookie['identity'] = 'USER: {}'.format(identity)

    for set_cookie in cookie.values():
        resp.headers.add_header('Set-Cookie', set_cookie.OutputString())
    return b'Go back to <a href="/">index</a> to check your identity'

2. We can use it to create one that will parse the cookie and tell us who the current...