Web-Scraping using Scrapy

Pre-requisites: pip install scrapy

Remember before scraping:

• There is a robot.txt file for each website for what they allow. Check that out before you scrape so that you don't scrape endpoints which are not allowed.
• If there is any API available for getting the same info. Use that instead of scraping.

Performed Activities:

• Learnt using scrapy shell scrapy shell
  • Fetch Command fetch(<put_your_scraping_url_here/endpoint>)
  • The Crawler returned response can be viewed using. view(response) This will open the raw HTML in the default browser.
  • Print received response print(response.text)
  • Extracting element using css selector response.css(".value::text").extract()
  • Using XPath to get the elements. response.xpath("//div").extract()
• Creating a Scrapy project and custom Spider
  • scrapy startproject aliexpress
  • The command to create a spider scrapy genspider aliexpress_tablets <url>

References:

• Rules before scraping: https://towardsdatascience.com/scraping-the-internets-most-popular-websites-a4c6f0be382d
• Learn about XPath here: https://www.datacamp.com/courses/web-scraping-with-python
• Excellent article for starting: https://www.datacamp.com/community/tutorials/making-web-crawlers-scrapy-python
• Get data from following pages: https://www.tutorialspoint.com/scrapy/scrapy_following_links.htm