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Forked from saidimu/gist:1024207
Created July 18, 2011 21:10
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Generating URLs to crawl from outside a Scrapy spider
from scrapy import log
from scrapy.item import Item
from scrapy.http import Request
from scrapy.contrib.spiders import XMLFeedSpider
def NextURL():
"""
Generate a list of URLs to crawl. You can query a database or come up with some other means
Note that if you generate URLs to crawl from a scraped URL then you're better of using a
LinkExtractor instead: http://doc.scrapy.org/topics/link-extractors.html
"""
list_of_urls = <make some database call here to return a URL to crawl>
for next_url in list_of_urls:
yield next_url
class YourScrapingSpider(XMLFeedSpider):
"""
http://doc.scrapy.org/topics/spiders.html#xmlfeedspider
"""
name = "MyScrapingSpider"
## an empty list means all domains are allowed (logic offloaded to business code)
allowed_domains = []
## setup the generator that spits our next URLs to crawl. It is important to reuse this generator
## otherwise you'll always be returning the same URL
url = NextURL()
start_urls = []
def start_requests(self):
"""
NOTE: This method is ONLY CALLED ONCE by Scrapy (to kick things off).
Get the first url to crawl and return a Request object
This will be parsed to self.parse which will continue
the process of parsing all the other generated URLs
"""
## grab the first URL to being crawling
start_url = self.url.next()
log.msg('START_REQUESTS : start_url = %s' % start_url)
request = Request(start_url, dont_filter=True)
### important to yield, not return (not sure why return doesn't work here)
yield request
##start_requests()
def parse(self, response, node):
"""
Parse the current response object, and return any Item and/or Request objects
"""
log.msg("SCRAPING '%s'" % response.url)
## extract your data and yield as an Item (or DjangoItem if you're using django-celery)
scraped_item = Item()
scraped_item['some_value'] = "important value"
yield scraped_item
## get the next URL to crawl
next_url = self.url.next()
yield Request(next_url)
##parse()
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