pythonweb-scrapingscrapyxmlhttprequest

Scrapy crawler not processing XHR Request

My spider is only crawling the first 10 pages, so I am assuming it is not entering the load more button though the Request.

I am scraping this website: http://www.t3.com/reviews.

My spider code:

import scrapy
from scrapy.conf import settings
from scrapy.http import Request
from scrapy.selector import Selector
from reviews.items import ReviewItem


class T3Spider(scrapy.Spider):
    name = "t3" #spider name to call in terminal
    allowed_domains = ['t3.com'] #the domain where the spider is allowed to crawl
    start_urls = ['http://www.t3.com/reviews'] #url from which the spider will start crawling

    def parse(self, response):
        sel = Selector(response)
        review_links = sel.xpath('//div[@id="content"]//div/div/a/@href').extract()
        for link in review_links:
            yield Request(url="http://www.t3.com"+link, callback=self.parse_review)
#if there is a load-more button:
        if sel.xpath('//*[@class="load-more"]'):
            req = Request(url=r'http://www\.t3\.com/more/reviews/latest/\d+', headers = {"Referer": "http://www.t3.com/reviews", "X-Requested-With": "XMLHttpRequest"}, callback=self.parse)
            yield req
        else:
            return

    def parse_review(self, response):
        pass #all my scraped item fields

What I am doing wrong? Sorry but I am quite new to scrapy. Thanks for your time, patience and help.

Solution

  • If you inspect the "Load More" button, you would not find any indication of how the link to load more reviews is constructed. The idea behind is rather easy - the numbers after http://www.t3.com/more/reviews/latest/ suspiciously look like a timestamp of the last loaded article. Here is how you can get it:

    import calendar

from dateutil.parser import parse
import scrapy
from scrapy.http import Request


class T3Spider(scrapy.Spider):
    name = "t3"
    allowed_domains = ['t3.com']
    start_urls = ['http://www.t3.com/reviews']

    def parse(self, response):
        reviews = response.css('div.listingResult')
        for review in reviews:
            link = review.xpath("a/@href").extract()[0]
            yield Request(url="http://www.t3.com" + link, callback=self.parse_review)

        # TODO: handle exceptions here

        # extract the review date
        time = reviews[-1].xpath(".//time/@datetime").extract()[0]

        # convert a date into a timestamp
        timestamp = calendar.timegm(parse(time).timetuple())

        url = 'http://www.t3.com/more/reviews/latest/%d' % timestamp
        req = Request(url=url,
                      headers={"Referer": "http://www.t3.com/reviews", "X-Requested-With": "XMLHttpRequest"},
                      callback=self.parse)
        yield req

    def parse_review(self, response):
        print response.url

    Notes: