Rails save object to cookie

Question

How can I serialize an array or an object and then save it into a cookie?

cookies[:mydata] = serialize({
  :key1 => 'tralala',
  :key2 => 'hahaha'
})

Thx!

Answer 1

The recent rails vulnerabilities (especially the one involving rack), made me question how safe was the Marshal.load approach I initially recommended.

Please don't use is, as it's dangerous and may potentially allow remote code execution . I've removed it from this answer.

While not as flexible the following should work as well:

Initial object:

my_object = {:k1 => 'v1', :k2 => 'v2'}

Saving:

cookies[:my_data] = { 
  :value => my_object.to_json, 
  :expires => 4.years.from_now
}

Reading:

my_object = JSON.parse(cookies[:my_data])