What are allowed characters in cookies?

Question

What are the allowed characters in both cookie name and value? Are they same as URL or some common subset?

Reason I\'m asking is that I\'ve recently hit some strange

Answer 1

Years ago MSIE 5 or 5.5 (and probably both) had some serious issue with a "-" in the HTML block if you can believe it. Alhough it's not directly related, ever since we've stored an MD5 hash (containing letters and numbers only) in the cookie to look up everything else in server-side database.