MozillaCookieJar does not handle session cookies

[piotrdobrogost]

BPO	17164
Nosy	@orsenthil, @jdetrey, @remilapeyre
PRs	bpo-17164: Make MozillaCookieJar use curl's format for session cookies #11792 bpo-17164: Make MozillaCookieJar use curl's format for session cookies #11792 bpo-17164: Make MozillaCookieJar use curl's format for session cookies #11792
Files	session-cookies.patch: patch session-cookies-test.patch

^{Note: these values reflect the state of the issue at the time it was migrated and might not reflect the current state.}

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GitHub fields:

assignee = None
closed_at = None
created_at = <Date 2013-02-08.21:23:23.026>
labels = ['3.7', '3.8', 'type-bug', 'library']
title = 'MozillaCookieJar does not handle session cookies'
updated_at = <Date 2019-02-08.16:39:40.983>
user = 'https://bugs.python.org/piotrdobrogost'

bugs.python.org fields:

activity = <Date 2019-02-08.16:39:40.983>
actor = 'remi.lapeyre'
assignee = 'none'
closed = False
closed_date = None
closer = None
components = ['Library (Lib)']
creation = <Date 2013-02-08.21:23:23.026>
creator = 'piotr.dobrogost'
dependencies = []
files = ['37627', '37629']
hgrepos = []
issue_num = 17164
keywords = ['patch']
message_count = 6.0
messages = ['181703', '182501', '233574', '233579', '335081', '335095']
nosy_count = 5.0
nosy_names = ['orsenthil', 'piotr.dobrogost', 'jdetrey', 'remi.lapeyre', 'Ramy Abdel-Azim']
pr_nums = ['11792', '11792', '11792']
priority = 'normal'
resolution = None
stage = 'patch review'
status = 'open'
superseder = None
type = 'behavior'
url = 'https://bugs.python.org/issue17164'
versions = ['Python 3.6', 'Python 3.7', 'Python 3.8']

[piotrdobrogost]

It seems there's no information on how should session cookies be stored in the Netscape/Mozilla's cookies.txt file with regard to expiry time - see http://www.cookiecentral.com/faq/#3.5 Maybe Netscape has not been saving such cookies at all thus this lack of specification? Nevertheless, both wget and curl use 0 as expiry time to denote session cookies; it works both when reading cookies from file and writing to file. However Python's MozillaCookieJar's class uses empty string for the same purpose which makes it incompatible both with wget and curl - see http://hg.python.org/cpython/file/bd8afb90ebf2/Lib/http/cookiejar.py#l2027

I propose to make a change in implementation of MozillaCookieJar class and treat cookies with 0 set as expiry time as session cookies both when reading from a file and writing to a file.

Motivation for this bug report comes from the following question on Stack Overflow - http://stackoverflow.com/q/14742899/95735

[piotrdobrogost]

I could try to write a patch with some help if there was any chance it might be accepted. Where do I start?

[jdetrey]

Dear all,

Here is a small tentative patch for fixing this issue.

Expiry times for session cookies are now written as "0", and both "0" and "" are parsed as valid expiry times for session cookies.

Cheers,
Jérémie.

[jdetrey]

Hi again,

Attached is a patch for adding test cases to test_cookiejar.

Cheers,
Jérémie.

[RamyAbdel-Azim]

Hi,

Is there any update on this ticket? I would love to use Requests instead of writing a curl command and running it from the command line out of my script but I need this functionality to pull the cookies.txt file in.

Thanks!
_Ramy

[remilapeyre]

Hi Ramy, thanks for bumping the issue.

The solution suggested by Piotr Dobrogost is backward compatible and I think it's the right thing to do.

I opened a new PR thanks to the patch of Jérémie Detrey.