Is there a way to customize headers and cookies with IronWebScraper?

IronWebScraper is a C# library designed for web scraping, which means it's used within the context of .NET applications. Customizing headers and cookies is a common requirement when web scraping, as it can help to emulate a real user's browser session, and can be necessary for accessing certain web pages.

To customize headers and cookies in IronWebScraper, you can use the WebRequest class that's available in the library. This class allows you to modify the request before it is sent.

Here's an example of how you might set custom headers and cookies with IronWebScraper in a C# application:

using IronWebScraper;
using System.Net;

class CustomScraper : WebScraper
{
    public override void Init()
    {
        // Starting URL
        this.Request("http://example.com", Parse);
    }

    // Override this method to customize the WebRequest before it is sent
    public override WebRequest CreateWebRequest(string url)
    {
        var request = base.CreateWebRequest(url);

        // Custom headers
        request.Headers.Add("Custom-Header", "Value");
        request.UserAgent = "Custom User Agent String";

        // Custom cookies
        var cookieContainer = new CookieContainer();
        cookieContainer.Add(new Cookie("cookie_name", "cookie_value", "/", "example.com"));
        request.CookieContainer = cookieContainer;

        return request;
    }

    public override void Parse(Response response)
    {
        // Parse the response
    }
}

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        var scraper = new CustomScraper();
        scraper.Start();
    }
}

In this example, we have a CustomScraper class that inherits from WebScraper. We override the CreateWebRequest method to customize the headers and cookies. We add a custom header using request.Headers.Add and set a custom user agent with request.UserAgent. For cookies, we create a CookieContainer, add our cookies to it, and then assign the container to the request.CookieContainer.

To use IronWebScraper, you'll need to have it installed in your project. You can install it via NuGet Package Manager:

Install-Package IronWebScraper

Or using the .NET CLI:

dotnet add package IronWebScraper

Keep in mind that when scraping websites, you should always comply with the website's terms of service and respect robots.txt files where present. Additionally, excessive requests to a website can be considered abusive and may result in IP bans or legal action, so you should always scrape responsibly.