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

Stolen from NCZOnline:

There is some confusion over encoding of a cookie value. The commonly held belief is that cookie values must be URL-encoded, but this is a fallacy even though it is the de facto implementation. The original specification indicates that only three types of characters must be encoded: semicolon, comma, and white space. The specification indicates that URL encoding may be used but stops short of requiring it. The RFC makes no mention of encoding whatsoever. Still, almost all implementations perform some sort of URL encoding on cookie values. In the case of name=value formats, the name and value are typically encoded separately while the equals sign is left as is.