How to Read and Set Cookies with Python Requests

In Web development, Cookies are an important mechanism for saving user session information between the client and the server. Python's Requests library provides a powerful and simple method for processing HTTP requests, allowing us to easily read and set Cookies. This article will detail how to use the Requests library in Python to process Cookies.

Read Cookies

After sending an HTTP request, the server may return some cookies, which can be obtained through response.cookies;

import requests
response = requests.get('http://google.com')

print(response.cookies)

response.cookies returns a RequestsCookieJar object instance;

Traverse all cookies:

for cookie in response.cookies:
    print(f'{cookie.name}: {cookie.value}')

Get a cookie. If the cookie does not exist, a KeyError will be raised:

print(response.cookies['AEC'])
print(response.cookies.get('AEC'))

Set Cookies

In simple scenarios, if you only need to pass some basic cookie information, you can directly use a dictionary to pass cookies;

import requests

url = "http://example.com"

cookies = {
    'token': '123456'
}

response = requests.get(url, cookies=cookies)

In this example, the cookies parameter receives a normal dictionary, the key is the name of the cookie, and the value is the value of the corresponding cookie; this method is very simple and suitable for handling basic Cookie scenarios, but cannot handle cookie-related attributes (such as domain, path, etc.).

RequestsCookieJar Object

In addition to storing basic cookie key-value pairs, RequestsCookieJar can also store other attributes of cookies. For example, you can specify the domain, path, expiration time, etc. for each cookie, which is very important in complex Web request scenarios.

import requests
import time

jar = requests.cookies.RequestsCookieJar()

expires_time = int(time.time()) + 3600

jar.set('token', '123456', domain='example.com', path='/')
jar.set('token2', '123456', domain='example.com', path='/', expires=expires_time)

response = requests.get('https://example.com', cookies=jar)

Update RequestsCookieJar

Update the cookies returned by the server:

import requests

jar = requests.cookies.RequestsCookieJar()

response = requests.post('https://example.com/login')

jar.update(response.cookies)

response = requests.get('https://example.com/do',cookies=jar)