# Reading Firefox Cookies

Firefox stores its cookies in an SQLite database. In the directory ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles there is a default profile, e.g. abcd2efg.default. In this directory, there is a file named cookies.sqlite. We can read this in R using the RSQLite package. We install this in the usual manner. Then we load it and create a connection and read the table. `drv = SQLite() cookiesDB = sqliteNewConnection(con, "~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/abc.default/cookies.sqlite") dbListTables(cookiesDB) cookies = dbReadTable(cookiesDB, "moz_cookies")`

This gives us a data frame with 9 columns. `names(cookies) [1] "id" "name" "value" "host" "path" [2] "expiry" "lastAccessed" "isSecure" "isHttpOnly"`

Now we can use cookies with RCurl by extracting the values from this data frame and then passing them in RCurl calls. We use the cookie argument in the form `"name=expr"`, i.e. a string. We can specify multiple cookies by separating the name=value pairs by a semi-colon.