Getting jquery.cookie.js to read a cookie and redirect

Question

I'm quite new to jQuery, and I'm trying to get the jQuery plugin, jquery.cookie.js to write a cookie, and then redirect based on the cookie value. Here's an outline of what I'm trying to accomplish:

Upon landing on a splash page, the user selects their language preference. They can also check a "remember me" checkbox, which writes the cookie lang-pref with a value of either en or fr. Upon future visits, visitors are redirected to either an English homepage or a French homepage.

Here's my code for writing the cookie:

$(function() 
{
    $("#en").change(function() //#en is the id of the checkbox
    {
        if ($(this).is(":checked"))
        $.cookie('mem', 'en', { expires: 3652 }); // mem is the cookie name, en is the value
    })
});

And here is the code to read the cookie, which I'm reasonably sure I've screwed up, as the redirect doesn't work. I'm not sure how to fix it, though:

$(function() {
    if ($.cookie('mem'))
    $(location).html ("window.location.href = 'http://www.mysite.com/home-en.php'");
});

I've looked over the docs for this plugin, but I'm still not sure how to use the actual cookie's value to perform actions: the examples given on the project's GitHub page, for example, shows how to read a cookie, simply by doing what I've done in the code above.

Long story short, I can't figure out how to read the value of a cookie, and then use said value to perform a redirect.

Answer 1

Simple case of overcooking

$(function() {
    if ($.cookie('mem')) window.location.href = 'http://www.mysite.com/home-en.php';
});

Answer 2

The cookie's value is returned by $.cookie('mem'). To account for both English and French redirections (or any future language value) you can do the following:

$(document).ready(
     function() {
         var language_preference = $.cookie('mem');
         if (language_preference) {
             window.location.href = 'http://www.mysite.com/home-'+language_preference+'.php';
         }
     }
);

However, note this kind of language detection and redirection is usually done on the server-side. In PHP, after the cookie was set, it could be accessed in the global variable $_COOKIE. See documentation in the PHP Manual.

For example, instead of doing the redirection in the JS of another page, you can do this on the server-side with PHP:

if ($_COOKIE['mem']) :
    header('Location: http://www.mysite.com/home-'.$_COOKIE['mem'].'.php');
    exit;
endif;

The main advantage of this approach is that the user goes through only one splash page to get to the homepage, instead of two.