I recently began playing with mod_ruby, eruby and cgi.rb, which are all
wonderful things.

I would find it useful to be able to retrieve cookie values by indexing on
the name of the cookie, but I couldn't find a way to do this.

If there is such a method, can someone tell me what it is?

If not, here's a  small addition I made to cgi.rb that provides such a
mechanism.

It basically does precisely what CGI#cookies does, but returns a hash,
instead of an array.

Feel free to recode it, rename it, in fact do anything you like with it.

Also, what I really wanted to do was to use eval to generate a variable
for each of the values stored in a cookie.  However, because of the
SAFE level at which the code is running, eval is forbidden (I'm not sure
whether this is mod_ruby, eruby or cgi.rb).

Is it possible to override this?  I'm guessing not, since that would
bypass the security, but I thought I'd ask, just in case.

-------------------------------------------------

class CGI
 
    def cookies_hash(name)
 
        array   = cookies[name]
        hash    = Hash.new()
 
        array.each do |c|
            nameValue = c.split('=')
 
            hash[nameValue[0]] = nameValue[1]
        end
 
        return hash
 
    end
 
end