Java Reference
In-Depth Information
4.
Make sure to just the select the tick box next to Temporary Internet Files and then click the Delete
button. You now have a nice clean cache, which makes it easy to see when you create a cookie.
5.
You can now close the dialog box and return to the main Internet Options dialog box.
Let's have a look at the cookies you have currently residing on your machine.
6.
From the Internet Options dialog box, click the Settings button next to the Delete button
grouped under Browsing history. You should see the dialog box shown in Figure 11-4.
Figure 11-4
7.
Now click the View fi les button, and a list of all the temporary pages and cookie fi les on your
computer will be displayed. If you followed the previous instructions and deleted all tempo-
rary Internet fi les, there should be nothing listed, as shown in Figure 11-5.
The actual cookies, their names, and their values, may look slightly different depending on your com-
puter's operating system.
You can examine the contents of the cookies by double-clicking them. Note that you may get a warning
about the potential security risk of opening a text fi le, although you are fairly safe with cookies because
they are simply text fi les. In Figure 11-6 you can see the contents of the cookie fi le named
google
set by
the search engine Google.
As you can see, a cookie is just a plain old text fi le. Each web site, or
domain name
, has its own text fi le
where all the cookies for that web site are stored. In this case, there's just one cookie currently stored for
google.co.uk
. Domains like
amazon.com
will almost certainly have many cookies set.
In Figure 11-6, you can see the cookie's details. Here, the name of the cookie is
PREF
; its value is a series
of characters, which although indecipherable to you make sense to the Google web site. It was set by the
domain
google.co.uk
, and it relates to the root directory
/
. The contents probably look like a mess of
characters, but don't worry: When you learn how to program cookies, you'll see that you don't need to
worry about setting the details in this format.
