It seems there's no information on how should session cookies be stored in the Netscape/Mozilla's cookies.txt file with regard to expiry time - see http://www.cookiecentral.com/faq/#3.5 Maybe Netscape has not been saving such cookies at all thus this lack of specification? Nevertheless, both wget and curl use 0 as expiry time to denote session cookies; it works both when reading cookies from file and writing to file. However Python's MozillaCookieJar's class uses empty string for the same purpose which makes it incompatible both with wget and curl - see http://hg.python.org/cpython/file/bd8afb90ebf2/Lib/http/cookiejar.py#l2027

I propose to make a change in implementation of MozillaCookieJar class and treat cookies with 0 set as expiry time as session cookies both when reading from a file and writing to a file.

Motivation for this bug report comes from the following question on Stack Overflow - http://stackoverflow.com/q/14742899/95735

I could try to write a patch with some help if there was any chance it might be accepted. Where do I start?

Dear all,

Here is a small tentative patch for fixing this issue.

Expiry times for session cookies are now written as "0", and both "0" and "" are parsed as valid expiry times for session cookies.

Cheers,
Jérémie.

Hi again,

Attached is a patch for adding test cases to test_cookiejar.

Cheers,
Jérémie.

Hi,

Is there any update on this ticket? I would love to use Requests instead of writing a curl command and running it from the command line out of my script but I need this functionality to pull the cookies.txt file in.

Thanks!
_Ramy

Hi Ramy, thanks for bumping the issue.

The solution suggested by Piotr Dobrogost is backward compatible and I think it's the right thing to do.

I opened a new PR thanks to the patch of Jérémie Detrey.