Learn How Scrapy Can Make You a Better Web Developer
In short, Scrapy is a Python framework that allows you to easily build and run spiders to extract data from the web. A spider is a Python script that tells Scrapy how to crawl a particular website.
The main part of a spider is its class definition, which gives Scrapy all the details about where to start, what kinds of requests it should make, how to follow links on pages and more. You can also add custom functions to parse and process the data it finds before outputting it into a file.
Aside from a few exceptions, Scrapy can scrape pretty much anything online. You can use XPath, CSS selectors and Regular Expressions to define which parts of a page to pull out and store in an array of “Item” objects.
Those Items aren’t just an array of text though, they can include images and other multimedia elements as well. They’re a bit like Python dictionaries, but you can also define fields to store individual pieces of data.
Get Started with Scrapy
To start, you’ll need to have a copy of Python 2.7 or higher installed on your machine and at least some working libraries. You can install scrapy hamilton from scratch or pick up a pre-made project to get started with the software. Once your project is up and running, you can begin learning about the software by writing some code to scrape some websites.