Check if cookie exists else set cookie to Expire in 10 days

Question

Here is what I'm looking to do (pseudo-code):

Imagine the name of the cookie in the example is "visited" and it contains nothing.

if visited exists
then alert("hello again");
else
create visited - should expire in 10 days;
alert("This is your first time!")

How can I achieve this in JavaScript?

Answer 1

You need to read and write document.cookie

if (document.cookie.indexOf("visited=") >= 0) {
  // They've been here before.
  alert("hello again");
}
else {
  // set a new cookie
  expiry = new Date();
  expiry.setTime(expiry.getTime()+(10*60*1000)); // Ten minutes

  // Date()'s toGMTSting() method will format the date correctly for a cookie
  document.cookie = "visited=yes; expires=" + expiry.toGMTString();
  alert("this is your first time");
}

Answer 2

if (/(^|;)\s*visited=/.test(document.cookie)) {
    alert("Hello again!");
} else {
    document.cookie = "visited=true; max-age=" + 60 * 60 * 24 * 10; // 60 seconds to a minute, 60 minutes to an hour, 24 hours to a day, and 10 days.
    alert("This is your first time!");
}

is one way to do it. Note that document.cookie is a magic property, so you don't have to worry about overwriting anything, either.

There are also more convenient libraries to work with cookies, and if you don’t need the information you’re storing sent to the server on every request, HTML5’s localStorage and friends are convenient and useful.