Does MechanicalSoup support asynchronous requests?

MechanicalSoup is a Python library that acts as a high-level interface over libraries like requests and BeautifulSoup. It provides a simple way to automate interaction with websites—filling out forms, scraping web pages, and so on. However, MechanicalSoup does not natively support asynchronous requests as it is built on top of the requests library, which is a synchronous HTTP client.

If you need to perform asynchronous web scraping in Python, you would typically use libraries like aiohttp in combination with BeautifulSoup or aiohttp with aiosoup, which is specifically designed to be an asynchronous version of libraries like MechanicalSoup.

Here is an example of how you'd asynchronously fetch a webpage's content using aiohttp and parse it with BeautifulSoup:

import aiohttp
import asyncio
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

async def fetch_page(session, url):
    async with session.get(url) as response:
        return await response.text()

async def main():
    async with aiohttp.ClientSession() as session:
        html = await fetch_page(session, 'http://example.com')
        soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')
        print(soup.prettify())

if __name__ == '__main__':
    asyncio.run(main())

In the example above, aiohttp is used to asynchronously fetch the web page, and then BeautifulSoup is used to parse the HTML content.

If you need to perform multiple concurrent requests, you might use asyncio.gather to run them simultaneously:

async def main():
    urls = ['http://example.com', 'http://example.org', 'http://example.net']
    async with aiohttp.ClientSession() as session:
        tasks = [fetch_page(session, url) for url in urls]
        pages = await asyncio.gather(*tasks)
        soups = [BeautifulSoup(page, 'html.parser') for page in pages]
        for soup in soups:
            print(soup.title.get_text())

if __name__ == '__main__':
    asyncio.run(main())

Keep in mind that when scraping websites, you should always respect the target website's robots.txt file and terms of service. Be aware that making a large number of concurrent requests to a server may be considered abusive behavior and could lead to your IP being banned. Always use web scraping responsibly and ethically.