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First Python Scrapy Web Scraper Not Working

I took the Data Camp Web Scraping with Python course and am trying to run the 'capstone' web scraper in my own environment (the course takes place in a special in-browser environment). The code is intended to scrape the titles and descriptions of courses from the Data Camp webpage.
I've spend a good deal of time tinkering here and there, and at this point am hoping that the community can help me out.
The code I am trying to run is:
# Import scrapy
import scrapy
# Import the CrawlerProcess
from scrapy.crawler import CrawlerProcess
# Create the Spider class
class YourSpider(scrapy.Spider):
name = 'yourspider'
# start_requests method
def start_requests(self):
yield scrapy.Request(url= https://www.datacamp.com, callback = self.parse)
def parse (self, response):
# Parser, Maybe this is where my issue lies
crs_titles = response.xpath('//h4[contains(#class,"block__title")]/text()').extract()
crs_descrs = response.xpath('//p[contains(#class,"block__description")]/text()').extract()
for crs_title, crs_descr in zip(crs_titles, crs_descrs):
dc_dict[crs_title] = crs_descr
# Initialize the dictionary **outside** of the Spider class
dc_dict = dict()
# Run the Spider
process = CrawlerProcess()
process.crawl(YourSpider)
process.start()
# Print a preview of courses
previewCourses(dc_dict)
I get the following output:
C:\Users*\PycharmProjects\TestScrape\venv\Scripts\python.exe C:/Users/*/PycharmProjects/TestScrape/main.py
File "C:\Users******\PycharmProjects\TestScrape\main.py", line 20
yield scrapy.Request(url=https://www.datacamp.com, callback=self.parse1)
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
Process finished with exit code 1
I notice that the parse method in line 20 remains grey in my PyCharm window. Maybe I am missing something important in the parse method?
Any help in getting the code to run would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you,
-WolfHawk

The error message is triggered in the following line:
yield scrapy.Request(url=https://www.datacamp.com, callback = self.parse)
As an input to url you should enter a string and strings are written with ' or " in the beginning and in the end.
Try this:
yield scrapy.Request(url='https://www.datacamp.com', callback = self.parse)
If this is your full code, you are also missing the function previewCourses. Check if it is provided to you or write it yourself with something like this:
def previewCourses(dict_to_print):
for key, value in dict_to_print.items():
print(key, value)

Scrapy - unexpected unindent for "yield" command

I have a silly question that doesn't let me run the spider. Every time I run the spider, I get IndentationError for the last "}" at the end of my spider code after "yield" and I cannot find out WHY. Can someone help me out with the problem? Thanks a lot!!
Here is my spider:
-- coding: utf-8 --
import scrapy
import json
import logging
import urlparse
class ArtsPodcastsSpider(scrapy.Spider):
name = 'arts_podcasts'
allowed_domains = ['www.castbox.fm']
def start_requests(self):
try:
if response.request.meta['skip']:
skip=response.request.meta['skip']
else:
skip=0
while skip < 201:
url = 'https://everest.castbox.fm/data/top_channels/v2?category_id=10021&country=us&skip=0&limit=60&web=1&m=20201112&n=609584ea96edb64605bca96212128aa5&r=1'
split_url = urlparse.urlsplit(url)
path = split_url.path
path.split('&')
path.split('&')[:-5]
'&'.join(path.split('&')[:-5])
parsed_query = urlparse.parse_qs(split_url.query)
query = urlparse.parse_qs(split_url.query, keep_blank_values=True)
query['skip'] = skip
updated = split_url._replace(path='&'.join(base_path.split('&')[:-5]+['limit=60&web=1&m=20201112&n=609584ea96edb64605bca96212128aa5&r=1', '']),
query=urllib.urlencode(query, doseq=True))
updated_url=urlparse.urlunsplit(updated)
yield scrapy.Request(url= updated_url, callback= self.parse_id, meta={'skip':skip})
def parse_id(self, response):
skip=response.request.meta['skip']
data=json.loads(response.body)
category=data.get('data').get('category').get('name')
arts_podcasts=data.get('data').get('list')
for arts_podcast in arts_podcasts:
yield scrapy.Request(url='https://everest.castbox.fm/data/top_channels/v2?category_id=10021&country=us&skip={0}&limit=60&web=1&m=20201111&n=609ba0097bb48d4b0778a927bdcf69f4&r=1'.format(arts_podcast.get('list')[2].get('cid')), meta={'category':category,'skip':skip}, callback= self.parse)
def parse(self, response):
skip=response.request.meta['skip']
category=response.request.meta['category']
arts_podcast=json.loads(response.body).get('data')
yield scrapy.Request(callback=self.start_requests,meta={'skip':skip+1})
yield{
'title':arts_podcast.get('title'),
'category':arts_podcast.get('category'),
'sub_category':arts_podcast.get('categories')
}
Thank you!

The error is having a try without a matching except or finally.
I would expect this to result in SyntaxError, but I'm guessing python detects that you're back to the original indentation of the try statement before it figures out there is no matching except/finally.
There are other errors, such as accessing unexistant response in start_requests and parsing methods' indentation being wrong...

route results from yield to a file

I have the following Python script using Scrapy:
import scrapy
class ChemSpider(scrapy.Spider):
name = "site"
def start_requests(self):
urls = [
'https://www.site.com.au'
]
for url in urls:
yield scrapy.Request(url=url, callback=self.parse)
def parse(self, response):
category_links = response.css('li').xpath('a/#href').getall()
category_links_filtered = [x for x in category_links if 'shop-online' in x] # remove non category links
category_links_filtered = list(dict.fromkeys(category_links_filtered)) # remove duplicates
for category_link in category_links_filtered:
if "medicines" in category_link:
next_page = response.urljoin(category_link) + '?size=10'
self.log(next_page)
yield scrapy.Request(next_page, callback=self.parse_subcategories)
def parse_subcategories(self, response):
for product in response.css('div.Product'):
yield {
'category_link': response.url,
'product_name': product.css('img::attr(alt)').get(),
'product_price': product.css('span.Price::text').get().replace('\n','')
}
My solution will run multiple instances of this script, each scraping a different subset of information from different 'categories'. I know you can run scrapy from the command line to output to a json file, but i want do to the output to a file from within the function, so each instance writes to a different file. Being a beginner with Python, I'm not sure where to go with my script. I need to get the output of the yield into a file while the script is executing. How do i achieve this? There will be hundreds of rows scraped, and I'm not familiar enough with how yield works to understand how to 'return' from it a set of data (or a list) that can then be written to the file.

You are looking to append a file. But being file writing an I/O operation, you need to lock the file from being written by other processes while a process is writing.
Easiest way to achieve is to write in different random files (files with random names) in a directory and concatenating them all using another process.

First let me suggest you some changes to your code. If you want to remove duplicates i you could use a set like this:
category_links_filtered = (x for x in category_links if 'shop-online' in x) # remove non category links
category_links_filtered = set(category_links_filtered) # remove duplicates
note that i'm also changing the [ to ( to make a generator instead of a list and save some memory. Search more about generators: https://www.python-course.eu/python3_generators.php
OK then the solution for your problem is using an Item Pipeline (https://docs.scrapy.org/en/latest/topics/item-pipeline.html), what this does perfom some action on every item yielded from your function parse_subcategories. What you do is add a class in your pipelines.py file and enable this pipeline in settings.py. This is:
In settings.py:
ITEM_PIPELINES = {
'YOURBOTNAME.pipelines.CategoriesPipeline': 300, #the number here is the priority of the pipeline, dont worry and just leave it
}
In pipelines.py:
import json
from urlparse import urlparse #this is library to parse urls
class CategoriesPipeline(object):
#This class dynamically saves the data depending on the category name obtained in the url or by an atrtribute
def open_spider(self, spider):
if hasattr(spider, 'filename'):
#the filename is an attribute set by -a filename=somefilename
filename = spider.filename
else:
#you could also set the name dynamically from the start url like this, if you set -a start_url=https://www.site.com.au/category-name
try:
filename = urlparse(spider.start_url).path[1:] #this returns 'category-name' and replace spaces with _
except AttributeError:
spider.crawler.engine.close_spider(self, reason='no start url') #this should not happen
self.file = open(filename+'.jl', 'w')
def close_spider(self, spider):
self.file.close()
def process_item(self, item, spider):
line = json.dumps(dict(item)) + "\n"
self.file.write(line)
return item
In spiders/YOURBOTNAME.py modify this:
class ChemSpider(scrapy.Spider):
name = "site"
if !hasattr(self, 'start_url'):
spider.crawler.engine.close_spider(self, reason='no start url') #we need a start url
start_urls = [ self.start_url ] #see why this works on https://docs.scrapy.org/en/latest/intro/tutorial.html#a-shortcut-for-creating-requests
def parse(self, response):#...
and then you start your crawl with this command: scrapy crawl site -a start_url=https://www.site.com.au/category-name and you could optionally add -a filename=somename

How to integrate several 'yield' commands together in scrapy script

My issue is that when I added the redirect code from Can't get Scrapy to parse and follow 301, 302 redirects to my script, it solved the problem in that now it runs without errors, but now I'm not getting any output to my csv file. The problem is that in parse_links1, the if and else statements end with a 'yield' statement and this seems to be preventing the scrapy.Request line from implementing. This is fairly clear since in the previous iteration of this code, which only went down 2 levels of links, the code ran perfectly. But since the latest level has a redirect issue, I had to add that code in.
My code is like this:
class TurboSpider(scrapy.Spider):
name = "fourtier"
handle_httpstatus_list = [404]
start_urls = [
"https://ttlc.intuit.com/browse/cd-download-support"]
# def parse gets first set of links to use
def parse(self, response):
links = response.selector.xpath('//ul[contains(#class,
"list-unstyled")]//#href').extract()
for link in links:
yield scrapy.Request(link, self.parse_links,
dont_filter=True)
def parse_links(self, response):
tier2_text = response.selector.xpath('//a[contains(#class,
"dropdown-item-link")]//#href').extract()
for link in tier2_text:
schema = 'https://turbotax.intuit.com/'
links_to_use = urlparse.urljoin(schema, link)
yield scrapy.Request(links_to_use, self.parse_links1)
def parse_links1(self, response):
tier2A_text = response.selector.xpath('//a').extract()
for t in tier2A_text:
if response.status >= 300 and response.status < 400:
# HTTP header is ascii or latin1, redirected url will be percent-encoded utf-8
location=
to_native_str(response.headers['location'].decode('latin1'))
request = response.request
redirected_url = urljoin(request.url, location)
if response.status in (301, 307) or request.method
== 'HEAD':
redirected =
request.replace(url=redirected_url)
yield redirected
else:
redirected =
request.replace(url=redirected_url,
method='GET', body='')
redirected.headers.pop('Content-Type', None)
redirected.headers.pop('Content-Length', None)
yield redirected
yield scrapy.Request((t, self.parse_links2))
def parse_links2(self, response):
divs = response.selector.xpath('//div')
for p in divs.select('.//p'):
yield{'text':p.extract()}
What is wrong with the way I've set up the 'yield' in the parse_links1 function so that now I don't get any output? How to integrate several 'yield' commands together?

See Debugging Spiders.
Some logging statements should allow you to determine where something unexpected is happening (execution not reaching a certain line, some variable containing unexpected data), which in turn should help you either understanding what the issue is or writing a more specific question that is easier to answer.

Python Scrapy not outputting to csv file

What am I doing wrong with the script so it's not outputting a csv file with the data? I am running the script with scrapy runspider yellowpages.py -o items.csv and still nothing is coming out but a blank csv file. I have followed different things here and also watched youtube trying to figure out where I am making the mistake and still cannot figure out what I am not doing correctly.
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import scrapy
import requests
search = "Plumbers"
location = "Hammond, LA"
url = "https://www.yellowpages.com/search"
q = {'search_terms': search, 'geo_location_terms': location}
page = requests.get(url, params=q)
page = page.url
items = ()
class YellowpagesSpider(scrapy.Spider):
name = 'quotes'
allowed_domains = ['yellowpages.com']
start_urls = [page]
def parse(self, response):
self.log("I just visited: " + response.url)
items = response.css('a[class=business-name]::attr(href)')
for item in items:
print(item)

Simple spider without project.
Use my code, I wrote comments to make it easier to understand. This spider looks for all blocks on all pages for a pair of parameters "service" and "location". To run, use:
In your case:
scrapy runspider yellowpages.py -a servise="Plumbers" -a location="Hammond, LA" -o Hammondsplumbers.csv
The code will also work with any queries. For example:
scrapy runspider yellowpages.py -a servise="Doctors" -a location="California, MD" -o MDDoctors.json
etc...
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import scrapy
from scrapy.http import Request
from scrapy.exceptions import CloseSpider
class YellowpagesSpider(scrapy.Spider):
name = 'yellowpages'
allowed_domains = ['yellowpages.com']
start_urls = ['https://www.yellowpages.com/']
# We can use any pair servise + location on our request
def __init__(self, servise=None, location=None):
self.servise = servise
self.location = location
def parse(self, response):
# If "service " and" location " are defined
if self.servise and self.location:
# Create search phrase using "service" and " location"
search_url = 'search?search_terms={}&geo_location_terms={}'.format(self.servise, self.location)
# Send request with url "yellowpages.com" + "search_url", then call parse_result
yield Request(url=response.urljoin(search_url), callback=self.parse_result)
else:
# Else close our spider
# You can add deffault value if you want.
self.logger.warning('=== Please use keys -a servise="service_name" -a location="location" ===')
raise CloseSpider()
def parse_result(self, response):
# all blocks without AD posts
posts = response.xpath('//div[#class="search-results organic"]//div[#class="v-card"]')
for post in posts:
yield {
'title': post.xpath('.//span[#itemprop="name"]/text()').extract_first(),
'url': response.urljoin(post.xpath('.//a[#class="business-name"]/#href').extract_first()),
}
next_page = response.xpath('//a[#class="next ajax-page"]/#href').extract_first()
# If we have next page url
if next_page:
# Send request with url "yellowpages.com" + "next_page", then call parse_result
yield scrapy.Request(url=response.urljoin(next_page), callback=self.parse_result)

for item in items:
print(item)
put yield instead of print there,
for item in items:
yield item

On inspection of your code, I notice a number of problems:
First, you initialize items to a tuple, when it should be a list: items = [].
You should change your name property to reflect the name you want on your crawler so you can use it like so: scrapy crawl my_crawler where name = "my_crawler".
start_urls is supposed to contain strings, not Request objects. You should change the entry from page to the exact search string you want to use. If you have a number of search strings and want to iterate over them, I would suggest using a middleware.
When you try to extract the data from CSS you're forgetting to call extract_all() which would actually transform your selector into string data which you could use.
Also, you shouldn't be redirecting to the standard output stream because a lot of logging goes there and it'll make your output file really messy. Instead, you should extract the responses into items using loaders.
Finally, you're probably missing the appropriate settings from your settings.py file. You can find the relevant documentation here.
FEED_FORMAT = "csv"
FEED_EXPORT_FIELDS = ["Field 1", "Field 2", "Field 3"]