How to Handle Cookies in Web Scraping
Introduction to cookies in web scraping. What are they and how to take advantage of cookie process to authenticate or set website preferences.
Every modern web browser comes with a special suite of tools for web developers called the Developer Tools (or devtools for short).
This suite contains a lot of powerful tools used in web scraper development that can help to debug and understand how the target websites work.
Devtools can be launched on any website using the F12 key or by right-clicking anywhere on the page and selecting "inspect" option.
To start, the "Elements" tab allows for inspecting the final HTML structure of the page. This can be used to create CSS and XPath selectors for scraping:
The "Network" tab (aka the Network Inspector) can be used to inspect the network traffic of the page. This can be used to understand how the website works and discover its backend and hidden APIs:
One of the most popular features of Network devtools is the ability to export the requests to cURL commands (right click -> copy as curl) that can be converted to scraping code using tools like curlconverter.
Introduction to cookies in web scraping. What are they and how to take advantage of cookie process to authenticate or set website preferences.
In this article, we’ll take a look at the User-Agent header, what it is and how to use it in web scraping. We'll also generate and rotate user agents to avoid web scraping blocking.
Localization allows for adapting websites content by changing language and currency. So, how do we scrape it? We'll take a look at the most common methods for changing language, currency and other locality details in web scraping.
