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You're reading from  Python Web Scraping Cookbook

Product typeBook
Published inFeb 2018
Reading LevelBeginner
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781787285217
Edition1st Edition
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Michael Heydt
Michael Heydt
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Michael Heydt

Michael Heydt is an independent consultant, programmer, educator, and trainer. He has a passion for learning and sharing his knowledge of new technologies. Michael has worked in multiple industry verticals, including media, finance, energy, and healthcare. Over the last decade, he worked extensively with web, cloud, and mobile technologies and managed user experiences, interface design, and data visualization for major consulting firms and their clients. Michael's current company, Seamless Thingies , focuses on IoT development and connecting everything with everything. Michael is the author of numerous articles, papers, and books, such as D3.js By Example, Instant Lucene. NET, Learning Pandas, and Mastering Pandas for Finance, all by Packt. Michael is also a frequent speaker at .NET user groups and various mobile, cloud, and IoT conferences and delivers webinars on advanced technologies.
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Randomizing user agents

Which user agent you use can have an effect on the success of your scraper. Some websites will flat out refuse to serve content to specific user agents. This can be because the user agent is identified as a scraper that is banned, or the user agent is for an unsupported browser (namely Internet Explorer 6).

Another reason for control over the scraper is that content may be rendered differently by the web server depending on the specified user agent. This is currently common for mobile sites, but it can also be used for desktops, to do things such as delivering simpler content for older browsers.

Therefore, it can be useful to set the user agent to other values than the defaults. Scrapy defaults to a user agent named scrapybot. This can be configured by using the BOT_NAME parameter. If you use Scrapy projects, Scrapy will set the agent to the name of your...

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Python Web Scraping Cookbook
Published in: Feb 2018Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781787285217

Author (1)

author image
Michael Heydt

Michael Heydt is an independent consultant, programmer, educator, and trainer. He has a passion for learning and sharing his knowledge of new technologies. Michael has worked in multiple industry verticals, including media, finance, energy, and healthcare. Over the last decade, he worked extensively with web, cloud, and mobile technologies and managed user experiences, interface design, and data visualization for major consulting firms and their clients. Michael's current company, Seamless Thingies , focuses on IoT development and connecting everything with everything. Michael is the author of numerous articles, papers, and books, such as D3.js By Example, Instant Lucene. NET, Learning Pandas, and Mastering Pandas for Finance, all by Packt. Michael is also a frequent speaker at .NET user groups and various mobile, cloud, and IoT conferences and delivers webinars on advanced technologies.
Read more about Michael Heydt