Verdant Fox
Blog Posts by Date | tag: 'tutorial'
Python web scraping with Playwright
December 14, 2022 / 22 min read / 5,745 , 1 , 0
Web scraping is the concept of programmatically collecting data from a website. This article will discuss using Playwright for python web scraping. The most popular web-scraping packages for python are requests and Beautiful Soup used together. This combination is potent and straightforward to use for most web pages. However, the use case has limitations because the combination relies on making server requests and reading the static HTML returned. It can be challenging to scrape single-page applications (SPAs) or websites where the objects to scrape are only available after some javascript interactions. Playwright circumvents these limitations by interacting with web pages like humans to find the data that needs scraping.
Cookies with the Flask web framework
October 18, 2022 / 12 min read / 4,975 , 1 , 0
Cookies! 🍪🍪 Tasty snack or valuable web development tool? 🤷♂️ For our context today, cookies are small pieces of data sent from the server to the client. The client's browser stores cookies locally and then sends the cookies back to the server with every request. Cookies are used for a variety of purposes, including session management (who's logged in?), keeping track of user settings (use dark mode?), and tracking user behavior (website analytics, ad targeting). In this tutorial, we'll talk about how to manage cookies with the Flask web framework. We'll go over setting, updating, retrieving, and deleting cookies in Flask routes.