MechanicalSoup is a Python library for automating interaction with websites. It provides a simple API for navigating, filling out forms, and scraping web content. It is built on top of the requests library and BeautifulSoup. To customize the user-agent string in MechanicalSoup, you can modify the headers of the requests.Session object that MechanicalSoup uses.
Here's an example of how to set a custom user-agent string in MechanicalSoup:
import mechanicalsoup
# Create a new browser instance
browser = mechanicalsoup.StatefulBrowser()
# Define a custom user-agent string
user_agent = "MyCustomUserAgent/1.0"
# Set the custom user-agent string
browser.session.headers.update({'User-Agent': user_agent})
# Now you can use the browser object to navigate with your custom user-agent
response = browser.open("http://example.com")
# Verify that the custom User-Agent header has been set
print(response.request.headers['User-Agent']) # Should print: MyCustomUserAgent/1.0
In this example, we first import the mechanicalsoup library and create a StatefulBrowser object. We then define a custom user-agent string and update the browser.session.headers dictionary to include our custom user-agent. The StatefulBrowser object uses this session to make all subsequent requests, so the custom user-agent will be used for all requests made by this browser instance.
Finally, we open a URL to ensure that the custom user-agent string is being used. You can verify this by checking the headers of the response object, where the 'User-Agent' header should reflect the custom value we set.
Remember that when web scraping, it's important to follow the terms of service of the website you're interacting with. Some websites may have specific rules about the use of custom user-agent strings. Moreover, be respectful and avoid making excessive requests that could overload the website's servers.
