Web Scraping and POST Request - Basic
Interview Questions
Web Scraping – General
Q1. What is web scraping?
• Extracting data from websites by programmatically accessing and
parsing the content.
Q2. What are some common libraries used for web scraping in
Python?
• requests, BeautifulSoup, lxml, Scrapy, Selenium, Playwright
Q3. What is the difference between requests.get() and requests.post()?
• GET: Used to retrieve data.
• POST: Used to send data to a server and often returns a result
based on the posted data.
Q4. When would you use a POST request instead of GET in scrap-
ing?
• When data is submitted via a form or the site uses POST to
generate content dynamically.
Q5. What are some challenges you might face while scraping a
website?
• JavaScript-rendered content, rate limiting / CAPTCHAs, chang-
ing site structure, legal and ethical concerns.
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Q6. How can you handle pagination while scraping?
• Inspect the URL or POST parameters to identify pagination mech-
anisms (e.g., page number, offset).
Q7. What are headers and why are they important in HTTP re-
quests?
• Headers (like User-Agent) mimic browser behavior, manage cook-
ies, or provide authentication.
Practical POST Request Scraping
Q8. How do you simulate form submission using requests.post()?
import requests
url = " https :// example . com / form "
data = {
’ username ’: ’ myuser ’ ,
’ password ’: ’ mypass ’
}
response = requests . post ( url , data = data )
Q9. What is the purpose of inspecting network traffic in developer
tools when scraping?
• To understand how data is sent or received, especially to find API
endpoints and POST payloads.
Q10. How do you handle sessions and cookies while scraping?
import requests
s = requests . Session ()
s . get ( " https :// example . com / login " )
s . post ( " https :// example . com / auth " , data = login_data )
Q11. How can you deal with JavaScript-rendered content when
scraping?
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• Use tools like Selenium, Playwright, or inspect network activity
to find backend APIs.
Q12. What is a headless browser and why is it useful for scraping?
• A browser without a GUI. Useful for automation and scraping
JS-heavy pages with tools like Selenium or Playwright.
Q13. What is the role of robots.txt in web scraping?
• It’s a site’s guideline for bots. Ethical scrapers respect it, though
it’s not enforced technically.
Q14. How can you avoid being blocked while scraping?
• Use proxies, rotate user agents, delay requests, use headless browsers,
and respect rate limits.
Q15. How can you extract data from HTML using BeautifulSoup?
• Use methods like .find(), .find all(), .select(), or .get text().
Q16. How can you debug failed POST requests?
• Check payload structure, headers, cookies, status codes, and net-
work traffic in browser dev tools.
Q17. What is a session in requests, and why is it useful?
• A requests.Session() object persists cookies and headers, mak-
ing it easier to manage authenticated sessions.
Q18. What HTTP status codes are relevant when scraping?
• 200 OK, 403 Forbidden, 404 Not Found, 429 Too Many Requests,
301/302 Redirect
