How POST Requests with Python Make Web Scraping Easier

When scraping a website with Python, it’s common to use the

urllib

Requests

GET

However, you’ll eventually need to send some information to the website yourself before receiving the data you want, maybe because it’s necessary to perform a log-in or to interact somehow with the page.

To execute such interactions, Selenium is a frequently used tool. However, it also comes with some downsides as it’s a bit slow and can also be quite unstable sometimes. The alternative is to send a

POST

In fact, when compared to Requests, Selenium becomes a very slow approach since it does the entire work of actually opening your browser to navigate through the websites you’ll collect data from. Of course, depending on the problem, you’ll eventually need to use it, but for some other situations, a

POST

In this article, we’ll see a brief introduction to the

POST

Web Scraping 

Although

POST

Being able to perform such tasks is an important ability while web scraping, as it’s not rare to have to interact with the web page before reaching the data, you’re aiming to scrape.

Identifying an HTML Form

Before you start sending information to the website, you first need to understand how it will receive such information. Let’s say the idea is to log in to your account. If the site receives the username and password through an HTML form, it will probably look like this:

If that’s the case, all you have to do is send the username and the password within your

POST

But how to identify and even see what the HTML form looks like? For this, we can go back to our old friend: the

GET

GET

This is a simple code for this task:

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
page = requests.get('http://website.com').text
soup = BeautifulSoup(page, 'html.parser')
forms = soup.find_all('form')
for form in forms:
   print(form)

And this is how our simple login form that will be the output of the code above:

<form action="login.html" method="post"> 
User Name: <input name="username" type="text"/><br/> 
Password: <input name="password" type="text"/><br/> 
<input id="submit" type="submit" value="Submit"/>
</form>

In a form like this, the “action” is where in the website you should send your request, and the “username” and “password” are the fields you want to fill. You can also notice the type for these values is specified as text.

Submitting Your First POST 

Now it’s time to send your first

POST

The data is usually a dictionary where the keys are the names of the fields you intend to fill, and values are what you’re going to fill the fields with. The data can also be passed in different ways, but that’s a more complex approach that’s out of scope for this article.

The code is pretty simple. Actually, you can get it done with only two lines of code:

payload = {'username': 'user', 'password': '1234'}
r = requests.post('http://website.com/login.html', data=payload)
print(r.status_code)

The third line of code is just so you can see the status code of your request. You want to see a status code of 200, which means everything is OK. To learn more about it, click here.

We can now make this process more sophisticated by implementing the

POST

1. The

post_request

2. Inside the function, we’ll use a

try

except

3. If the code doesn’t crash and we receive a response from the server, we’ll then check if this response is the one we’re expecting. If so, the function will return it.

4. If we get a different status code, nothing will be returned, and the status will be printed.

5. If the code raises an exception, we’ll want to see what happened, and so the function will print this exception.

And this is the code for all this:

def post_request(url, payload):     
    try:           
        r = requests.post(url, data=payload)             
        if r.status_code == 200:                 
            return r
        else:
            print(r.status_code)
    except Exception as e:             
        print(e)

Depending on the website, however, you’ll need to deal with other issues in order to actually perform a login. The good news is that the Requests library provides resources to deal with cookies, HTTP authentications, and more that will have you covered. The goal here was just to use a common type of form as an easy example to understand for someone that had never used a

POST

Final Considerations

Especially if you’re sending a lot of requests to a particular website, you might want to insert some random pauses in your code in order not to overload the server and use even more

try

except 

post_request

Of course, it’s also a good practice to take advantage of a proxy provider, such as Infatica, to make sure your code will keep running as long as there are requests left to submit and data to be collected, and that you and your connection are protected.

The idea of this article is to be only an introduction to

POST 

I hope you’ve enjoyed this and that it can maybe be useful somehow. If you have a question, a suggestion, or just want to be in touch, feel free to be in touch.