How to Authenticate and Retrieve Cookies for Web Scraping with Python\'s Built-in Modules?

Python Authentication and Cookie Retrieval for Web Access

When embarking on a web scraping endeavor using Python, authentication and cookie retrieval often become essential steps. In this scenario, accessing a webpage requires prior login, which necessitates sending POST parameters to a login page and retrieving cookies from the response header.

To accomplish this in Python, we resort to the following steps:

1. Utilize Built-in Modules: To adhere to the preference of using only built-in modules, we employ the versatile requests library.
2. Establish a Session: Python's requests module provides a valuable session object that maintains cookies and other transaction-specific information across HTTP requests.
3. Craft the Login Request: We construct a POST payload containing the login credentials and dispatch it to the login endpoint.
4. Retrieve the Cookies: The response from the login request typically includes cookies, which we extract and store.
5. Access Protected Pages: Armed with the retrieved cookies, we can now send another HTTP request to the target webpage, carrying the necessary cookies.

As exemplified in the provided code snippet, this process entails:

• Utilizing the requests.session() function to initiate a session.
• Deploying the post() method to send login credentials to the login endpoint.
• Employing the get() method to retrieve the protected webpage.
• Extracting cookie information from the response headers.
• Displaying both the response headers and the webpage's content.

Through this approach, we successfully authenticate to a webpage, acquire cookies during login, and leverage them to access protected content, enabling seamless web scraping operations.

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