Cookies and Funky Characters
Today's weird problem had to do with a browser cookie not keeping the value I gave it. The cookie's value is an encrypted string. I noticed in the debugger that what was written out was not what was read in later. The decryption failed because the encrypted value retrieved from the cookie just didn't make sense. Apparently cookies are sent as HTTP headers and can only use US-ASCII characters minus whatever other special characters don't work (you can wade through several RFCs if you like). In my case it was trailing "="s that were being eaten.
The easiest solution (besides just not using those characters) is to encode the values. Something like base64 or using the URL encode/decode utility classes in Java would easily do the trick.
The more interesting thing is that we use other cookies to store all kinds of strings, sometimes internationalized funky character containing strings. Those Unicode characters also don't get handled very well in cookie values so there is a general need to encode/decode them. Maybe it's just safest to always encode on the way out and decode on the way in.
Chalk up another one for things I probably should have known but didn't. Yay!
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