Strip quotes for cookie values for .get()

[naruaway]

According to RFC 2965, cookie value can be "quoted-string" and in practice, some web framework (e.g. Java Spring) sometimes uses quoted value. In such cases, web browser will send HTTP headers like Cookie: my_value_a=x; my_value_b="abc:def:xyz"; to the server and it will be more developer friendly to automatically strip quotes so that cookie.get('my_value_b') returns abc:def:xyz rather than "abc:def:xyz".

Is this this library's responsibility?

I guess so. I checked the behavior of Django and Express and both of them strip quotes under the hood.

• Django

  • Django is explicitly stripping quotes when creating COOKIES dict using Python's undocumented _unquote function

• Express

  • Official doc for req.cookies
  • In the official cookie middieware, it's using cookie.parse
  • And cookie.parse is explicitly unquoting it

What's the impact of this change?

koa is relying on this library. After this fix, koa can get the same behavior as Django and Express, which seems to be more reasonable and common behavior. I created an issue for koa for the discussion in koa side.

Note that this change will be breaking change so we need to bump up the major version of the library.

[naruaway]

@dougwilson Thank you so much! If possible, could you publish the new version? It looks like the latest one is still 0.8.0, published 3 years ago :pray:

[dougwilson]

Hi @naruaway apologies, I didn't realize I never made a release 😂 I'll get it out today/tomorrow 👍

[naruaway]

Hi @dougwilson, thanks for the quick response! Are you going to release patch or minor, or major?

Strictly speaking this could be "breaking change" but on the other hand we could say this is a bug fix 🤔 One benefit of releasing this as a patch version would be, koa will get this change automatically without changing any koa code (they are specifying ~0.8.0)

My personal feeling is that patch version would be fine (I think no one should rely on the previous behavior considering the behavior of other frameworks like Django...) but it's your call of course 🙏

[dougwilson]

Hi @naruaway this is not the only change in the release. It will be included in the 0.9.0 release.

[naruaway]

Hi @dougwilson, oh right, it makes sense. Thanks for all your work 🙏

[naruaway]

Hi @dougwilson, are you going to release 0.9.0? Sorry for pinging you but a dev from koa mentioned that they will bump up the version of cookies after 0.9.0 gets released