Scrapy.Request returns <GET url> without scraping anything

Question

I wanted to scrape the feed of sitepoint.com, this is my code:

import scrapy
from urllib.parse import urljoin


class SitepointSpider(scrapy.Spider):
    # TODO: Add url tags (like /javascript) to the spider based on class paraneters
    name = "sitepoint"
    allowed_domains = ["sitepoint.com"]
    start_urls = ["http://sitepoint.com/javascript/"]

    def parse(self, response):
        data = []
        for article in response.css("article"):
            title = article.css("a.t12xxw3g::text").get()
            href = article.css("a.t12xxw3g::attr(href)").get()
            img = article.css("img.f13hvvvv::attr(src)").get()
            time = article.css("time::text").get()
            url = urljoin("https://sitepoint.com", href)
            text = scrapy.Request(url, callback=self.parse_article)

            data.append(
                {"title": title, "href": href, "img": img, "time": time, "text": text}
            )
        yield data

    def parse_article(self, response):
        text = response.xpath(
           '//*[@id="main-content"]/article/div/div/div[1]/section/text()'
        ).extract()
        yield text

And this is the response I get:-

[{'title': 'How to Build an MVP with React and Firebase', 
'href': '/react-firebase-build-mvp/', 
'img': 'https://uploads.sitepoint.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/1632802723react-firebase-mvp- 
app.jpg', 
'time': 'September 28, 2021', 
'text': <GET https://sitepoint.com/react-firebase-build-mvp/>}]

It just does not scrape the urls. I followed everything said in this question but still could not make it work.

Answer 1

You have to visit the detail page from the listing to scrape the article.

In that case you have to yield the URL first then yield the data in the last spider

Also, the //*[@id="main-content"]/article/div/div/div[1]/section/text() won't return you any text since there are lots of HTML elements under the section tag

One solution is you can scrape all the HTML element inside section tag and clean them later to get your article text data

here is the full working code

import re

import scrapy
from urllib.parse import urljoin


class SitepointSpider(scrapy.Spider):
    # TODO: Add url tags (like /javascript) to the spider based on class paraneters
    name = "sitepoint"
    allowed_domains = ["sitepoint.com"]
    start_urls = ["http://sitepoint.com/javascript/"]

    def clean_text(self, raw_html):
        """
        :param raw_html: this will take raw html code
        :return: text without html tags
        """
        cleaner = re.compile('<.*?>|&([a-z0-9]+|#[0-9]{1,6}|#x[0-9a-f]{1,6});')
        return re.sub(cleaner, '', raw_html)

    def parse(self, response):
        for article in response.css("article"):
            title = article.css("a.t12xxw3g::text").get()
            href = article.css("a.t12xxw3g::attr(href)").get()
            img = article.css("img.f13hvvvv::attr(src)").get()
            time = article.css("time::text").get()
            url = urljoin("https://sitepoint.com", href)
            yield scrapy.Request(url, callback=self.parse_article, meta={"title": title,
                                                                         "href": href,
                                                                         "img": img,
                                                                         "time": time})

    def parse_article(self, response):
        title = response.request.meta["title"]
        href = response.request.meta["href"]
        img = response.request.meta["img"]
        time = response.request.meta["time"]
        all_data = {}
        article_html = response.xpath('//*[@id="main-content"]/article/div/div/div[1]/section').get()
        all_data["title"] = title
        all_data["href"] = href
        all_data["img"] = img
        all_data["time"] = time
        all_data["text"] = self.clean_text(article_html)

        yield all_data