title: Should cookie values be URL encoded?
body: <p>When setting cookies, PHP url-encodes the cookie value (at least when not using <code>setrawcookie</code>) <strong>and it url-decodes the cookie value</strong> before making it available to the application in <code>$_COOKIE</code>.</p>
  
  <p>Is this an accepted standard? If I set a raw cookie value of <code>a%3Db</code>, would I get back <code>a=b</code> in most web programming languages (through their respective cookie-reading mechanisms)?</p>