retrieve cookies with Perl

#! /usr/bin/perl -w

use CGI;
use CGI::Cookie;

my %cookies = fetch CGI::Cookie;
my $cookie = $cookies{ "username" };

if ( $cookie eq "" )
{
    $cookie = "There was no cookie named username!";
}
else
{
    $cookie = "Found a cookie name username with a value of " . $cookie;
}

print $q->header( -cookie=>$cookie ),
         $q->start_html( 'Perl Cookie Example II' ),
         $q->p, $cookie, $q->p,
         $q->end_html;
 

Notes

• As in creation, you may retrieve cookies without using the CGI library.  But then, you have to access cookies via the enviornment variable HTTPD_COOKIE.  The variable is a string that contains all the cookies, separated by semicolons.  To access a specific cookie, you will have to either search through the string or split the string into separate cookies before accessing them.
• The above example lets the CGI library do all the dirty work.