Scrapy – Feed exports

Scrapy is a fast high-level web crawling and scraping framework written in Python used to crawl websites and extract structured data from their pages. It can be used for many purposes, from data mining to monitoring and automated testing.

This article is divided into 2 sections:

1. Creating a Simple web crawler to scrape the details from a Web Scraping Sandbox website (http://books.toscrape.com/)
2. Exploring how Scrapy Feed exports can be used to store the scraped data to export files in various formats.

Creating a Simple web crawler

We are going to create a web crawler to scrape all the book details(URL, Title, Price) from a Web Scraping Sandbox website

1. Installation of packages – run the following command from the terminal 

pip install scrapy

2.  Create a Scrapy project – run the following command from the terminal 

scrapy startproject booklist
cd booklist 
scrapy genspider book http://books.toscrape.com/

Here,

• Project Name:  “booklist”
• Spider Name: “book”
• Domain to be Scraped: “http://books.toscrape.com/” 

Directory Structure:

Directory Structure

3. Create an Item – replace the contents of “booklist\items.py” file with the below code

We define each Item scraped from the website as an object with the following 3 fields:

• url
• title
• price

4. Define the Parse function –  Add the following code to “booklist\spiders\book.py”

The response from the crawler is parsed to extract the book details (i.e. URL, Title, Price) as shown in the below code

5. Run the spider using following command:

scrapy crawl book

Output:

Output Items

Scrapy Feed Exports

One of the most frequently required features when implementing scrapers is being able to store the scraped data as an “export file”.

Scrapy provides this functionality out of the box with the Feed Exports, which allows to generate feeds with the scraped items, using multiple serialization formats and storage backends.

The different file formats supported are:

• CSV
• JSON
• JSON Lines
• XML

1. Saving Files via the Command Line

The simplest way to export the file of the data scraped, is to define a output path when starting the spider in the command line.

Add the flag -o to the scrapy crawl command along with the file path you want to save the file to

• CSV – “data/book_data.csv” 
• JSON – “data/book_data.json” 
• JSON Lines – “data/book_data.jsonl”
• XML – “data/book_data.xml”  

scrapy crawl book -o data/book_data.csv
scrapy crawl book -o data/book_data.json
scrapy crawl book -o data/book_data.jsonl
scrapy crawl book -o data/book_data.xml

There are 2 options to using this command:

2. Saving Files using Feed Exports

For serializing the scraped data, the Feed Exports internally use the Item Exporters.

Saving the Data via FEEDS setting:

The scraped data can stored by defining the FEEDS setting in the “booklist\settings.py” by passing it a dictionary with the path/name of the file and the file format

Saving the Data via custom_settings:

The scraped data can also be stored by configuring the FEEDS setting in each individual spider by setting a custom_setting in the spider (“booklist\spiders\book.py”) for various file formats required.

Setting Dynamic File Paths/Names:

The generated data files can be stored using dynamic Path/Name as follows:

Below code creates a JSON file in the data folder, followed by the subfolder with the spiders name, and a file name that includes the spider name and date it was scraped.

The generated path would look something like this.

"data/book/book_2023-01-15T16-53-02.json"

Saved Files Output:

Saved Files Output