I used cookies recently in a project to maintain state and store values between accesses and it worked rather well for me HOWEVER, I found the CGI::Cookie routine to be rather useless for my purposes as it is difficult to mix CGI.pm with other code that is not OO and most of mine was pure long hand. So, if you find that you have problems with the header timing you can use a javascript that writes your cookie in a blank html page that has a refresh rate set to 1. The page is written by the perl script and only appears for a brief second but performs the job marvelously. There are many examples available that illustrate how to break up cookie data easy enough once it's been written in either java or perl so you should not have a problem....

if ($ENV{'HTTP_COOKIE'}) {
   @cookies = split (/; /, $ENV{'HTTP_COOKIE'});
   foreach $cookie (@cookies) {
    ($name, $value) = split (/=/, $cookie);
    $cookie_hash{$name} = $value;
   }
}
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Google it, you'll find a ton of examples...

TexasTess
"Great Spirits Often Encounter Violent Opposition From Mediocre Minds" --Albert Einstein