Why did my editor destroy the file?

The format requires literal U+0009 tabs. YAML/Markdown/prettier pipelines often expand them. Treat cookies.txt as binary-ish: convert here, do not pretty-print.

Does curl emit this exact warning?

No. curl typically loads nothing. The wording is CookieMan’s. The cause (spaces) is the same class of bug.

What if only one line was skipped?

The rest still parse. Read the warning prefix (first 60 characters of the line) to find the bad row. Fix or drop it.

Fix: Skipped invalid Netscape line

Fix “Skipped invalid Netscape line” (spaces, not tabs)

Skipped invalid Netscape line is the warning this parser emits when a row does not have seven tab-separated fields. Paste a space-separated file below: if columns 2 and 4 are TRUE/FALSE and column 5 is digits, the line is reconstructed and a warning says separators were spaces, not tabs.

The rewritten output is real tabs plus the Netscape header. That is the file curl and yt-dlp want.

Skipped invalid Netscape linecookies.txt spaces not tabsNetscape tabscookies.txt not loading

1
Get the broken file
Usually a cookies.txt opened in an IDE with “convert tabs to spaces” on save, or copied through a UI that collapses whitespace.
2
Paste it here
The sample is already space-separated. Convert. You should see a reconstruction warning and a valid Netscape output.
3
Replace the file on disk
Download and overwrite. Do not open it in an editor that rewrites tabs. Feed curl -b or yt-dlp --cookies.

Paste the broken cookies.txt

Output format

Output

Cookies are credentials. Conversion stays in this page — delete the file when you are done.

Message → cause → fix

Message	Cause	Fix
`Skipped invalid Netscape line: …`	Fewer than 7 tab fields and the space-pattern did not match	Restore tabs; keep TRUE/FALSE uppercase; keep seven columns
`Reconstructed Netscape line for "name" — separators were spaces, not tabs`	Space-separated but pattern matched	Already fixed — download the tabbed output
No cookies, file looks fine	All lines start with `#` and are not `#HttpOnly_`	Those are comments — see HttpOnly prefix guide

Repair splits on whitespace using a TRUE/FALSE/TRUE/FALSE/digits pattern. Cookie values that themselves contain runs of spaces can be truncated. Prefer a tabbed original when values have spaces.

Canonical line after repair

            # Netscape HTTP Cookie File
# https://curl.se/docs/http-cookies.html

.example.com	TRUE	/	TRUE	1789200000	session_id	abc123

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August 13, 2026 3 min read

Fix cookies.txt Millisecond Expiry

A 13-digit Netscape expiry is milliseconds, not Unix seconds. CookieMan divides values greater than 1e12 by 1000 and warns. Paste the file here to rewrite column 5.

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Fix #HttpOnly_ Dropped as a Comment

Naive parsers skip every # line and delete HttpOnly session cookies. CookieMan keeps #HttpOnly_ rows. Paste the file here to rewrite it.

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