How can I circumvent bot protection when scraping full NYTimes articles? - web

Question

I am trying to scrape full book reviews from the New York Times in order to perform sentiment analysis on them. I am aware of the NY Times API and am using it to get book review URLs, but I need to devise a scraper to get the full article text, as the API only gives a snippet. I believe that nytimes.com has bot protection to prevent bots from scraping the website but I know there are ways to circumvent it.
I found this python scraper that works and can pull full text from nytimes.com, but I would prefer to implement my solution in Go. Should I just port this to Go or is this solution unnecessarily complex? I have already played around with changing the User-Agent header but everything that I do in Go ends in an infinite redirect loop error.
Code:
package main
import (
//"fmt"
"io/ioutil"
"log"
"math/rand"
"net/http"
"time"
//"net/url"
)
func main() {
rand.Seed(time.Now().Unix())
userAgents := [5]string{
"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2228.0 Safari/537.36",
"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/50.0.2661.102 Safari/537.36",
"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/52.0.2743.116 Safari/537.36",
"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:46.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/46.0",
"Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:41.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/41.0",
}
url := "http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/books/review/the-tsar-of-love-and-techno-by-anthony-marra.html"
client := &http.Client{}
req, err := http.NewRequest("GET", url, nil)
if err != nil {
log.Fatalln(err)
}
req.Header.Set("User-Agent", userAgents[rand.Intn(len(userAgents))])
resp, err := client.Do(req)
if err != nil {
log.Fatalln(err)
}
defer resp.Body.Close()
body, err := ioutil.ReadAll(resp.Body)
if err != nil {
log.Fatalln(err)
}
log.Println(string(body))
}
Results in:
2016/12/05 21:57:53 Get http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/books/review/the-tsar-of-love-and-techno-by-anthony-marra.html?_r=4: stopped after 10 redirects
exit status 1
Any help is appreciated! Thank you!

Answer 1

You just have to add cookies to your client:
var cookieJar, _ = cookiejar.New(nil)
var client = &http.Client{Jar: cookieJar}
resp, err := client.Do(req)
if err != nil {
log.Fatalln(err)
}
// now response contains all you need and
// you can show it on the console or save to file