Question 1

What is the Netscape cookie format?

Accepted Answer

The Netscape cookie format (also called the Mozilla cookies.txt format) is a tab-separated plain text format used by browsers and tools like curl and wget. Each line contains seven fields: domain, hostOnly flag (TRUE/FALSE), path, secure flag (TRUE/FALSE), expiry as a Unix timestamp, cookie name, and cookie value. Lines starting with # are comments. This format is widely used for importing and exporting cookies in automation tools.

Question 2

What is the difference between JSON and EditThisCookie JSON formats?

Accepted Answer

Both are JSON arrays of cookie objects, but EditThisCookie JSON includes extra browser-specific fields like storeId, sameSite, session (boolean), and an incremental id field. Standard JSON format uses a minimal set of fields: name, value, domain, path, secure, httpOnly, and expirationDate. EditThisCookie format is used by the popular Chrome extension of the same name and is compatible with cookie import/export workflows in browser automation.

Question 3

Why does the HTTP header format lose cookie data?

Accepted Answer

The HTTP Cookie request header format only transmits name=value pairs, for example: session_id=abc123; theme=dark. It intentionally omits metadata like domain, path, expiry, and security flags because those are stored client-side and are not sent to the server. When converting from HTTP header format to Netscape or JSON, the converter fills in default values (root path, current domain placeholder, no expiry) since that metadata is not available in the source.

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