The urllib library in Python provides useful tools for scraping and interacting with websites. One key concept is the urllib session, which allows you to persist certain parameters across requests to the same website.
What is a Session?
A session essentially maintains the context for a series of requests made from the same client to the same server. This allows the client to easily carry over authentication, cookies, headers etc between requests.
For web scraping, sessions are useful to emulate a regular browser session. Many websites track a particular browser session to validate users. By reusing the same session, we can scrape these sites more effectively.
Creating a Session
Here is how you create a session in urllib:
import urllib.request
session = urllib.request.urlopen(url="http://example.com") This will initialize a session object that we can use to make subsequent requests.
Using the Session
We can now make multiple requests using this session object to retain cookies, headers etc:
response = session.open("http://example.com/protected_page")The session will automatically handle cookies, authorization headers to access protected pages as if its the same browser making these requests.
Tips for Effective Use
Here are some tips:
Conclusion
Urllib sessions allow persisting specific parameters across multiple requests. This is very useful for web scraping authenticated sites or sites that track browser state. Leverage sessions to reliably scrape modern web applications.