Sessions and Cookies

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

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

print(session.cookies)

---

When to use sessions

• after login
• multi-step forms
• sites with tracking

---

Graph: session flow

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