Cookie Problems

ImEric12

Hey, I'm a fairly advanced PHP developer and usually don't have many problems I need to ask help with, however, I have come across a recent problem that I can't seem to find a solution to. A script that I am writing requires me to use libcurl to connect to another website. I am using cURL and regex to get a list of recent private message notifications. Thusly, I need cookies to sign into my account. The site, however, does not seem to conform to RFC 2109.

What I am faced with is this:
CookieName=CookieValue1=Foo&CookieValue2=Bar

What I do not understand, is how my browser can even interpret this. I thought the Netscape/Mozilla cookie standard was this:
CookieName=CookieValue; CookieName2=CookieValue2

The site has a cookie, that I will call below call SiteCookie. The value has equal signs in it, which should be invalid. It appears that the cookie uses a URI style syntax. The userid, some various settings, and md5 hash are stored in the same cookie, which makes no sense to me. At least, they should have used a delimiter. I'll show you exactly what I am dealing with in standard 'Name'='Value' format:
'SiteCookie'='userid=47&miscboolsettings=1&auth=md5hash'

I've tried all I could to get curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIE, $cookie) to work. It will not interpret it. I've also tried SETOPT_COOKIEFILE (redundantly the same), and CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER. PHP won't assume what I am entering is correct. Basically, it isn't correct. I don't know how this is working. I've checked in multiple browsers, used HTTP header interception, tried using %3D. Nothing works!

I wonder if any of you might have any idea what is going on. This isn't like any other cookie I've dealt with before. Can libcurl even handle it?

Thanks for your help.

AstroTeg

Have you verified Curl's cookie file to see if it at least grabbed the cookie? Or is it part of the problem - it won't write to the cookie file since it isn't the typical cookie format?

I've seen and have done this with ASP. ASP code makes it really easy and results in this flavor of cookies. What ends up happening is ASP interprets and handles cookies like this like an array.

So for something like this:
SiteCookie'='userid=47&miscboolsettings=1&auth=md5hash

You'd have

cookie['SiteCookie']['userid'] = 47
cookie['SiteCookie']['miscboolsettings'] = 1
cookie['SiteCookie']['auth'] = md5hash

I've used Curl with cookies, but I haven't run into a cookie configured like this. My thought would be to at least try to get the cookie and make sure you're receiving it ok (are you getting any errors?) If you're receiving it ok, then it might be a matter of trying to access it.

Worse-comes-to-worse, I believe you can tell Curl to fetch and return the headers. Ugly as it may be, you could parse the headers for the cookie info and build your own cookie parser.

ImEric12

Well, I have no need to get the server response headers. All I'm trying to accomplish is to use client headers.

There's just no way curl can interpret a cookie in that format. Unless there is another extension of php http handling that I am unaware of, I think I'm stuck...

AstroTeg

Hmm - you saying with this option set to non-zero:

CURLOPT_HEADER: Set this option to a non-zero value if you want the header to be included in the output.

You don't get the cookie information tucked away in there?

Have you looked inside the cookie file? Can you find your cookies in there? If you have data in there, you could always manually parse the file and extract the info that way.

Just ideas... Don't know if they'll help.