python requests library cookies

Python Requests Library Cookies

As a programmer, I have been using the Python Requests Library for a while now, and it has been really helpful in making HTTP requests to web pages. The library comes with many functionalities, including adding cookies to the request headers.

What are Cookies?

Cookies are small pieces of data that are stored on the client-side by web servers. The main purpose of cookies is to provide a way for web servers to remember users and their preferences across different requests. Cookies are sent with every HTTP request and response headers, and they can be used to store information such as user ID, session ID, and other user preferences.

How to Add Cookies with Python Requests Library?

To use cookies with the Python Requests library, we need to import the library and create a session object first. A session object is a stateful object that can persist data across different requests.

import requests

   session = requests.Session()
   

Once we have created a session object, we can add cookies to it using the 'cookies' attribute of the session object.

session.cookies.set('name', 'value')

Here, we are using the 'set' method of the 'cookies' attribute to add a cookie named 'name' with a value of 'value'. We can also add multiple cookies at once using a dictionary object.

cookies = {'name1': 'value1', 'name2': 'value2'}
   session.cookies.update(cookies)

Here, we are using the 'update' method to add multiple cookies to the session object. We simply pass a dictionary object containing the cookie names and values as arguments.

Conclusion

Adding cookies to HTTP requests is an essential aspect of web development, and Python Requests library makes it really easy to do so. Using the session object and the 'cookies' attribute, we can easily add cookies to our requests and persist the data across different requests.