How exactly does document.cookie work?
If I get Chrome to show me document.cookie by going into the console and typing document.cookie; it'll give me, say:
"name=John; gender=male";
But then if I type in, say, document.cookie = 5; all it does is add 5; to the start of the string, so I get:
"5; name=John; gender=male";
If I try document.cookie = null; then it doesn't even do anything.
How can this be? It's a variable, isn't it? So why isn't the assignment operator working the way it should? Is it actually just a bit of syntactic sugar rather than a real variable? And if so, what precisely is the sugar covering up?
Answer
document.cookie has very special behavior. As you've seen, assigning to it adds (or updates) a cookie (or multiple cookies), rather than replacing all of the cookies. It's very unusual.
Read all about it on MDN.