What are allowed characters in cookies?

Question

What are the allowed characters in both cookie name and value? Are they same as URL or some common subset?

Reason I\'m asking is that I\'ve recently hit some strange

Answer 1

Newer rfc6265 published in April 2011:

cookie-header = "Cookie:" OWS cookie-string OWS
cookie-string = cookie-pair *( ";" SP cookie-pair )
cookie-pair  = cookie-name "=" cookie-value
cookie-value = *cookie-octet / ( DQUOTE *cookie-octet DQUOTE )

cookie-octet = %x21 / %x23-2B / %x2D-3A / %x3C-5B / %x5D-7E
                   ; US-ASCII characters excluding CTLs,
                   ; whitespace DQUOTE, comma, semicolon,
                   ; and backslash

If you look to @bobince answer you see that newer restrictions are more strict.