Web Scraping with python requests

Question

I want to scrape https://sparrow.eoffice.gov.in/IPRSTATUS/IPRFiledSearch and download the entire set of PDF files that show up in the search results as on date (say 01-01-2016). The employee fields are optional. On clicking search, the site throws up a list of all the employees. I am unable to get the post method to work using python requests. Keep getting a 405 error. My code is below

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests

url = "https://sparrow.eoffice.gov.in/IPRSTATUS/IPRFiledSearch"

data = {
    'assessmentYearId':'vH4pgBbZ8y8rhOFBoM0g7w',
    'empName':'',
    'allotmentYear':'',
    'cadreId':'',
    'iprReportType':'cqZvyXc--mpmnRNfPp2k7w',
    'userType':'JgPOADxEXU1jGi53Xa2vGQ',
    '_csrf':'7819ec72-eedf-4290-ba70-6f2b14cc4b79'
}

headers = {
    'Accept':'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8',
    'Accept-Encoding':'gzip, deflate',
    'Accept-Language':'en-US,en;q=0.8',
    'Cache-Control':'max-age=0',
    'Connection':'keep-alive',
    'Content-Length':'184',
    'Content-Type':'application/x-www-form-urlencoded',
    'Upgrade-Insecure-Requests':'1',
    'User-Agent':'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.36'
}

response = requests.post(url,data=data,headers=headers)

Answer 1

I'm not familiar with the website but I strongly suggest reading their policy before trying to scrape the content.

In similar scenarios when you don't get the expected results by a simple post, using requests.Session usually helps.

Answer 2

The problem lay in my using the same csrf code. Needs to be changed with every request.