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

urllibor theRequestslibraries to sendGETrequests to the server in order to receive its information.

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

POSTrequest containing the information the website needs using the request library.

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

POSTrequest may be your best option, which makes it an important tool for your web scraping toolbox.

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

POSTmethod and how it can be implemented to improve your web scraping routines.

#python #web-scraping #requests #web-scraping-with-python #data-science #data-collection #python-tutorials #data-scraping