Sessions and Cookies
Understand cookies and sessions, and learn how to maintain state across multiple requests like a real browser.
Websites remember you using **cookies**. Cookies store: - login info - preferences - session ids If you don’t keep them, the site may treat every request as new. ## Why sessions matter Without sessions: - you may get logged out - pagination may break - site may block you --- ## Using requests.Session ```python import requests session = requests.Session() session.headers.update({ "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0" }) res1 = session.get("https://example.com") res2 = session.get("https://example.com/profile") ``` Both share cookies automatically. --- ## Inspect cookies ```python print(session.cookies) ``` --- ## When to use sessions - after login - multi-step forms - sites with tracking --- ## Graph: session flow ```mermaid flowchart TD A[First Request] --> B[Receive Cookies] B --> C[Session Stores Cookies] C --> D[Next Request] D --> E[Same Identity] ``` ## Remember - Session acts like a browser - Cookies maintain identity - Always use Session for multi-step scraping