Empty RequestsCookieJar in Python requests

Question

I'm working with Python requests module.

>>> import requests
>>> s1 = requests.Session()
>>> r1 = s1.get("https://www.facebook.com/")
>>> r1.cookies
<RequestsCookieJar[Cookie(version=0, name='fr', ... ]>

ie the RequestsCookieJar is full, and It is full for every url I try. But for Instagram I get:

>>> s2 = requests.Session()
>>> r2 = s2.get("https://www.instagram.com/")
>>> r2.cookies
<RequestsCookieJar[]>

ie the RequestsCookieJar is empty, but it should return something.

Could someone please explain me why this is happening?

Thank you.

Answer 1

Its because of instagram. When you open instagram firstly it won't send you cookies, you have to log in, or make a get request again.

Update: As you want to login, and want csrf token, there is the method:

import json
import requests
import lxml.html

def get_csrf_token(content):
    xpath_data = lxml.html.fromstring(content).xpath('/html/body/script[1]/text()')[0]
    raw_json = xpath_data[xpath_data.find('{'):-1]
    return json.loads(raw_json)["config"]["csrf_token"]

def get_main_page():
    session = requests.Session()
    content = session.get('https://instagram.com')

    csrf_token = get_csrf_token(content.content)
    header = {'x-csrftoken'      : csrf_token,
              'x-requested-with' : 'XMLHttpRequest',
              'User-Agent'       : "Your user agent there",
              "referer"          : 'https://instagram.com',
              "cookie"           : "ig_cb=1",
              "origin"           : 'https://instagram.com'}

    session.headers.update(header)

I assume that you could write the "POST" method to pass through login.