Let’s talk about cookies! No, not the delicious chocolate chip kind that you can eat while coding (although we all wish). We’re talking about HTTP state management cookies. In case you didn’t know, when you visit a website and log in or add items to your cart, those actions are stored on your computer as little text files called cookies. These cookies allow the website to remember who you are and what you did so that it can provide a better user experience for you next time you visit.

Python’s built-in `http.cookies` module helps us handle these delicious (not really) little text files by providing classes to abstract the concept of cookies and support both simple string-only cookies as well as any serializable data type as cookie value. Let’s see how we can create a new cookie object using Python’s `http.cookies` module:

# Importing the necessary modules from the http.cookies library
from http.cookies import SimpleCookie, Morsel

# Creating a new SimpleCookie object to store our cookies
cookie = SimpleCookie()

# Adding a cookie with the key 'username' and value 'johndoe' to our cookie object
cookie['username'] = 'johndoe'

# Creating a new Morsel object to store our password as a byte string for added security
password = Morsel(b'supersecret123')

# Adding a cookie with the key 'password' and value 'password' to our cookie object
cookie['password'] = password

# Printing out our cookie object to see the cookies we have created
print(cookie)

In this example, we first import the `SimpleCookie` class from the `http.cookies` module and create a new cookie object called `cookie`. We then set two cookies: one with a simple string value (username), and another with a more complex data type using Python’s built-in `Morsel` class to store binary data for password security.

To handle cookies in Python, we can use the `http.cookiejar` module which is used for handling cookies in requests. Here’s an example:

# Import the necessary modules
import http.cookiejar as cookielib # Import the http.cookiejar module and alias it as cookielib for easier use
from urllib.request import urlopen, Request # Import the urlopen and Request functions from the urllib.request module

# Create a new cookie jar object
cookie_jar = cookielib.CookieJar()

# Set up the request object with the desired URL
request = Request('https://www.example.com')

# Add a cookie to the request header
request.add_header("Cookie", "username=johndoe")

# Send the request and store the response in a variable
response = urlopen(request)

# The response will contain the data from the requested URL, including any cookies that were set by the server.

In this example, we first import Python’s `http.cookiejar` module (which is used for handling cookies in requests), as well as the `urlopen()` function from the `urllib.request` module to make our HTTP request.

We then create a new cookie jar object called `cj`, and set up a new request object using Python’s built-in `Request()` class. We add our previously created cookie (which we stored in the `cookie` variable) as an additional header for this request, and send it to the server using the `urlopen()` function.

And that’s all there is to it! With Python’s built-in `http.cookies` module, you can easily handle HTTP state management cookies in your applications.