How to setting a cookie with the contents of a textbox ?

Values stored in cookies may not have semicolons, commas, or spaces. You should use the handy "escape()" function to encode the values, and "unescape()" to retrieve them.

//Sets cookie of current value for myTextBox
function TextBoxOnchange() {
var myBox = window.document.getElementById(myTextBox");
document.cookie = "myTextBox="+ escape(myBox.value) + getExpirationString();
}

//return a string like ";expires=Thu, 5 Jan 2006 16:07:52 UTC"
function getExpirationString() {
var exp = new Date();
var threemonths = exp.getTime()+(120*24*60*60*1000);
exp.setTime(threemonths);
return ";expires="+exp.toGMTString();
}

This is called from the event handler in the HTML.

<input name="myTextBox" type="text" id="myTextBox"
onchange="javascript:TextBoxOnchange()" />