Yes, it is possible to customize headers with HTTParty for a web scraping request. HTTParty is a popular Ruby gem that simplifies the process of making HTTP requests from Ruby applications. Custom headers can be important for web scraping because they can help mimic a real user's browser request, which can prevent your scraper from being blocked by the website you are trying to scrape.
Here's an example of how you can customize headers using HTTParty in a Ruby script:
require 'httparty'
url = 'https://example.com/somepage'
# Custom headers
headers = {
"User-Agent" => "My Custom User Agent",
"Accept" => "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8",
"Accept-Language" => "en-US,en;q=0.5",
# ... any other headers you want to customize
}
response = HTTParty.get(url, headers: headers)
puts response.body
In the above example, the headers hash contains custom headers that will be sent along with the GET request. The "User-Agent" header is often changed to mimic a browser because some websites deliver different content based on the user agent string, or use it as part of their security measures to block bots.
When you run this script, HTTParty will send an HTTP GET request to the specified url with the custom headers you've provided. The response from the server is stored in the response variable, and response.body will contain the HTML content of the page.
Remember to respect the website's robots.txt file and terms of service before scraping, and ensure that your scraping activities do not negatively impact the website's operation.
