We’re talking about HTTP cookies those little bits of data that websites store on your computer to remember things like your login information or shopping cart.

First off, what is a FileCookieJar? It’s basically a fancy way of saying that it’s a file on your computer where all your cookie data gets stored. And Python has this awesome library called “http.cookiejar” which includes some pretty sweet classes for working with cookies and their storage in files.

Now, the most important class FileCookieJar! This is essentially a subclass of CookieJar that can load from and save cookies to disk using the Mozilla cookies.txt file format (which is also used by curl and Lynx). But here’s where things get interesting… this loses information about RFC 2965 cookies, as well as newer or non-standard cookie attributes like port. So if you need that kind of data, you might want to look into other options.

But let’s say you don’t care about those fancy details and just want to save your cookies for later use. Well, all you have to do is create a new FileCookieJar object with the filename you want to store them in (or leave it blank if you want to use the default value). Then, whenever you need to load or save some cookie data, simply call the appropriate methods on that object!

Here’s an example script using Python 3.7:

# Import the necessary modules
import http.cookiejar # Importing the http.cookiejar module to handle cookies
from urllib.request import urlopen # Importing the urlopen function from the urllib.request module to open URLs

# Create a new FileCookieJar object with default filename
cookie_jar = http.cookiejar.FileCookieJar() # Creating a new FileCookieJar object and assigning it to the variable "cookie_jar"

# Load cookies from disk (if they exist)
cookie_jar.load(ignore_discard=True, ignore_expires=True) # Loading cookies from disk using the load method and passing in the parameters "ignore_discard" and "ignore_expires" to ignore cookies that have been marked for deletion and those that have expired, respectively.

# Open the website and get its content
response = urlopen('https://www.example.com') # Opening the website and assigning the response to the variable "response"
content = response.read().decode() # Reading the response and decoding it into a string, then assigning it to the variable "content"

# Close the connection to the server
response.close() # Closing the connection to the server using the close method

# Save cookies back to disk (if they changed)
cookie_jar.save(ignore_discard=True, ignore_expires=True) # Saving cookies back to disk using the save method and passing in the same parameters as before. This ensures that any changes made to the cookies are saved.

And that’s it! You now have a basic understanding of how Python can help you manage your HTTP cookies using FileCookieJar. Of course, there are many more options and details to explore in this library (like the other CookieJar subclasses), but hopefully this gives you a good starting point for your cookie-related adventures!

Later!