Request Interception

In general, request interception refers to capturing and manipulating requests made by a software application or a network communication. This interception can occur at various system levels, such as at the application layer, network layer, or even within a web browser. This enables to modify requests before they reach the destination or receiver side.

In web scraping, request interception is crucial in extracting data from websites. Web scraping involves the automated extraction of information from web pages, and intercepting requests is used to understand, control, and enhance this data extraction process. Here are some ways request interception is used in web scraping:

• Modifying headers and parameters

• Rate limiting and throttling

• Handling authentication

• Blocking unwanted requests

In this lesson, we will first see how to enable request interception in Puppeteer and then a few detailed use cases where we can benefit from it, with code examples to understand how to implement them.

Enabling request interception

First, we need to enable request interception. We can configure Puppeteer to use request interception like the one below.