The Python Scrapy framework has a concept known as Item Loaders. These Item Loaders are used to load data into Scrapy Items once they have been defined. During this process, we can apply input processors and output processors which clean up the extracted data in various ways. With an ItemLoader class and a few small but useful functions, you can strip unwanted characters, clean up whitespace characters, or otherwise modify the data being collected however you see fit.…

An Item in Scrapy is a logical grouping of extracted data points from a website that represents a real-world thing. You do not have to make use of Scrapy Items right away, as we saw in earlier Scrapy tutorials. You can simply yield page elements as they are extracted and do with the data as you wish. Items provide the ability to better structure the data you scrape, as well as massaging the data with Item Loaders rather than directly in the default Spider parse() method.…

Following links during data extraction using Python Scrapy is pretty straightforward. The first thing we need to do is find the navigation links on the page. Many times this is a link containing the text ‘Next’, but it may not always be. Then we need to construct either an XPath or CSS selector query to get the value contained in the href attribute of the anchor element we need.…

To create a project in Scrapy, you first want to make sure you have a good introduction to the framework. This will ensure that Scrapy is installed and ready to go. Once you are ready to go, we’ll look at how to create a new Python Scrapy project and what to do once it is created. The process is similar for all Scrapy projects, and this is a good exercise to practice web scraping using Scrapy.…

Fetching and selecting data from websites when you’re scraping with Python Scrapy can be tedious. There is a lot of updating the code, running it, and checking to see if you’re getting the results you expect. Scrapy provides a way to make this process easier, and it is called the Scrapy Shell. The Scrapy shell can be launched from the terminal so that you can test all of the various XPath or CSS selectors that you want to use in your Scrapy project.…

The Python Scrapy library is a very popular software package for web scraping. Web scraping is the process of programmatically extracting key data from online web pages using the software. Using this technique, it’s possible to scrape data from a single page or crawl across multiple pages, scraping data from each one as you go. This second approach is referred to as web crawling when the software bot follows links to find new data to scrape.…

The following cheat sheet for commonly used Python Turtle commands will get you up and running with Python Turtle quickly. Turtle is a fun program that dates all the way back to the 1960s when Seymour Papert and his colleagues at MIT created the programming language LOGO which could control a robot turtle with a physical pen in it. Today Turtle Graphics are most often associated with the Python programming language.…