Entry

onLoad - how do I store each URL in a cookie, then track the number of times it's been loaded

Apr 28th, 2000 08:12
Mike Hall, Chris Tanner,

One simple way is to store a cookie for each page using the URL as the 
name and use the value as a counter. First you need some basic functions 
for handling cookies:

function setCookie (name, value, expires) {

  //Set a cookie given a name, value and expiration date.

  document.cookie = name + "=" + escape(value) + "; expires=" + 
expires.toGMTString() +  "; path=/";
}

function getCookie(name) {

  var search;

  // Returns the value of the named cookie.

  search = name + "=";
  offset = document.cookie.indexOf(search);
  if (offset != -1) {
    offset += search.length;
    end = document.cookie.indexOf(";", offset);
    if (end == -1)
      end = document.cookie.length;
    return unescape(document.cookie.substring(offset, end));
  }
  else
    return "";
}

function deleteCookie(name) {

  var expdate = new Date();

  // Delete the named cookie.

  expdate.setTime(expdate.getTime() - (86400 * 1000 * 1));
  setCookie(name, "", expdate);
}

Then you can run this code to get and update the counter

var n = window.location;  // Get URL for cookie name.
var d = new Date();       // Today's date.
var c;                    // Holds the counter value.

// Set an expiration date, 30 days in this case.

d.setTime(exp.getTime() + (86400 * 1000 * 30));

// See if the cookie exists already, if not set it to 1. Otherwise
// bump the counter.

if ((c = getCookie(n)) == "")
  setCookie(n, 1, d);
else
  setCookie(n, c + 1, d);

Note: you don't need to wait for the ONLOAD event to run this.