Should cookie values be URL encoded?

Question

When setting cookies, PHP url-encodes the cookie value (at least when not using setrawcookie) and it url-decodes the cookie value before making

Answer 1

sytech's answer (which I have accepted) is certainly correct as it quotes the spec, but since the spec is rather vague, here's an overview how some web frameworks actually handle the matter:

RFC6265:           "for example Base64"
PHP:               URL encode
Go:                raw
Node.js + Express: URL encode