How to: Read a Cookie

Cookies provide a means in Web applications to store user-specific information, such as history or user preferences. A cookie is a small bit of text that accompanies requests and responses as they go between the Web server and client. The cookie contains information that the Web application can read whenever the user visits the site.

The browser is responsible for managing cookies on a user system. Cookies are sent to the server with a page request and are accessible as part of the HttpRequest object, which exposes a Cookies collection. You can read only cookies that have been created by pages in the current domain or path.

Procedure
To read a cookie

• Read a string from the Cookies collection using the cookie's name as the key.

The following example reads a cookie named UserSettings and then reads the value of the subkey named Font.
Visual Basic

If (Request.Cookies("UserSettings") IsNot Nothing) Then
Dim userSettings As String
If (Request.Cookies("UserSettings")("Font") IsNot Nothing) Then
userSettings = Request.Cookies("UserSettings")("Font")
End If
End If

Code in C#:

if (Request.Cookies["UserSettings"] != null)
{
string userSettings;
if (Request.Cookies["UserSettings"]["Font"] != null)
{ userSettings = Request.Cookies["UserSettings"]["Font"]; }
}


Compiling the Code

This example requires:

• An ASP.NET Web page.
• A cookie written previously named UserSettings