Example of code I used for passing cookies to the protocol implementation in Nutch

CookieConverter.java

package org.apache.nutch.protocol.httpclient;

import java.net.URL;
import java.text.ParseException;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.Date;
import java.util.List;

import org.apache.hadoop.io.Text;
import org.apache.hadoop.io.Writable;
import org.apache.http.cookie.Cookie;
import org.apache.http.impl.cookie.BasicClientCookie;
import org.apache.nutch.crawl.CrawlDatum;

/**
 * Returns a String representing the cookies to be sent to the protocol request.
 * 
 * @see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie
 **/

public class CookieConverter {

  public final static Text useCookiesKey = new Text("nutch.use.cookies");
  public final static Text cookiesKey = new Text("nutch.cookies");

  public static SimpleDateFormat dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat(
      "EEE, dd MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss zzz");

  public static List<Cookie> getCookies(CrawlDatum datum, URL targetURL) {

    ArrayList<Cookie> list = new ArrayList<Cookie>();

    Writable cookies = datum.getMetaData().get(cookiesKey);
    if (cookies == null || cookies.toString().length() == 0)
      return list;

    String[] cookiestrings = cookies.toString().split("\t");
    for (String cs : cookiestrings) {
      String name = null;
      String value = null;

      String expires = null;
      String domain = null;
      String path = null;

      boolean secure = false;

      String[] tokens = cs.split(";");

      int equals = tokens[0].indexOf("=");
      name = tokens[0].substring(0, equals);
      value = tokens[0].substring(equals + 1);

      for (int i = 1; i < tokens.length; i++) {
        String ti = tokens[i].trim();
        if (ti.equalsIgnoreCase("secure"))
          secure = true;
        if (ti.toLowerCase().startsWith("path=")) {
          path = ti.substring(5);
        }
        if (ti.toLowerCase().startsWith("domain=")) {
          domain = ti.substring(7);
        }
        if (ti.toLowerCase().startsWith("expires=")) {
          expires = ti.substring(8);
        }
      }

      BasicClientCookie cookie = new BasicClientCookie(name, value);

      // check domain
      if (domain != null) {
        cookie.setDomain(domain);

        if (!targetURL.getHost().contains(domain))
          continue;
      }

      // check path
      if (path != null) {
        cookie.setPath(path);

        if (!targetURL.getPath().startsWith(path))
          continue;
      }

      // check secure
      if (secure) {
        cookie.setSecure(secure);

        if (!targetURL.getProtocol().equalsIgnoreCase("https"))
          continue;
      }

      // check expiration
      if (expires != null) {
        try {
          Date expirationDate = dateFormat.parse(expires);

          // check that it hasn't expired?
          if (cookie.isExpired(new Date()))
            continue;

          cookie.setExpiryDate(expirationDate);
        } catch (ParseException e) {
          // ignore exceptions
        }
      }

      // attach additional infos to cookie
      list.add(cookie);
    }

    return list;
  }
}