ocookie - a comprehensive cookie library for Python

The goal of ocookie is to provide a comprehensive API for working with cookies.

cookielib provides cookie management functionality, but the client and server parts are separate and not easily convertible from one to the other. Using cookielib is complicated because it expects httplib request and response objects in order to parse cookies. Lastly, cookielib’s API itself can be improved.

ocookie should satisfy the needs of any application dealing with cookies. Specifically it aims to address the following use cases:

• HTTP clients/crawlers/scrapers dealing with cookies

• HTTP servers dealing with cookies

• HTTP proxies forwarding cookies

• Test frameworks keeping track of cookies and asserting over cookies

• Examining cookies returned from a single request

• Keeping track of session cookies via a cookie jar

• Maintaining pristine lists of cookie headers

• Accessing cookies as dictionaries

At the same time ocookie is intended to be easy to use:

• Client and server interfaces are similar where it makes sense

• Straightforward conversions from client to server objects and vice versa

• Clear and intuitive naming conventions

• Complete documentation

ocookie is not intended to provide a full cookie parser, as this turns out to be a rather complex undertaking. ocookie has a minimal parser that will work for most web sites and applications, and for the remaining cases ocookie will fall back on cookielib for cookie parsing.

Note: API is not yet stable.

Tests

Execute the test suite by running nosetests.

The test suite uses some nose features and will not work with unittest alone.