Ok, I couldn’t resist the title, and also too, Billy Collins’ line about “No cookie nibbled by a French novelist could send one into the past more suddenly” is just awesome so why not… But I digress…

At OpenDSP, we, obviously, cookie (yes, it is a verb — to cookie) users. While more details can be had in other posts (such as Nanoput, and more under DMP tag), here I’ll just address the format issue.

The cookies we use are known as mod_uid cookies because of the Apache project. (A good writeup is done here). Because we use NGINX, and, consequently, use its uid_set/uid_get functionality, one may be puzzled when reconciling the cookie as seen sent to the user and what NGINX writes in its logs. So here

• Python: convert cookie to hex
• Python: convert hex to cookie
• Go: convert cookie to hex — if you are wondering why Go, Go’s key feature of compiling to a standalone binary — which can then be used easily anywhere — is why.