Why do cookie values with whitespace arrive at the client side with quotes?

Question

I\'m a .NET developer starting to dabble in Java.

In .NET, I can set the value of a cookie to a string with white space in it: new HttpCookie(\"myCookieName\"

Answer 1

As far as I know, spaces must be encoded in cookies. Different browsers react differently to un-encoded cookies. You should URL-encode your cookie before setting it.

String cookieval = "my value";
String cookieenc = URLEncoder.encode(cookieval, "UTF-8");
res.addCookie(new Cookie("myCookieName", cookieenc));

ASP.NET does the encoding automatically, in Java you have to do it yourself. I suspect the quotes you see are added by the user agent.