How to Use Cookies and Session in Python Web Scraping

In this tutorial we will learn what are Cookies and Session, its importance in scraping and ways to use them with python request library.
An HTTP cookie is a special type of request header that represents a small piece of data sent from a website and stored on the user’s computer. It is different from other headers, as we are not the ones to choose it – it is the website that tells us how to set this field. Then, the cookie can be sent along with subsequent client requests.
Cookies were designed to be a reliable mechanism for websites to remember stateful information, such as items added in the shopping cart in an online store, or to record the user’s browsing activity.
They can also be used to remember arbitrary pieces of information that the user previously entered into form fields, such as names, addresses, passwords, and credit-card numbers.
Each time the users' web browser interacts with a web server it will pass the cookie information to the web server. Only the cookies stored by the browser that relate to the domain in the requested URL will be sent to the server.

[sinaorojlo]

Nice 🎉
You can use SET method to set cookies for session it's more professional

[Mrnafuturo]

Thanks for give us such wonderful information

[netflixandburn]

I've tried for like 2 hours to pass cookies I've gotten from a GET request to subsequent requests and it just does not work. It doesn't get all the cookies, and any new ones I add do not function properly.

[donaldandmijung]

why would session.cookies only have some of the cookies but in chrome inspector you can see alot more for same host?

[codingspy]

Can you tell me about how i compare two strings and show only the difference between the two strings in python

[codingspy]

Basically i perform web scrapping firstly i get data through url and stored in database then again i fetch data from url and compared with data that i have stored in database and i want to show only the difference

[woutervandenbussche]

i downloaded the file and tried opening but it kept closing

[eugenmalatov]

Sorry, I do not want to demotivate you, but it was a bit difficult to follow. In particular there was no real explanation of the difference between request cookies and response cookies.

- Why should fetching the cookies and sending them back "word-by-word" help?
- And what about the cookies stored by Chrome and Firefox?