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Introduction to Item Loaders

Item loaders, allow a smoother way, to manage scraped data. Many times, we may need to process, the data we scrape. This processing can be:

  • Refining or editing the text present.
  • Replacing any characters present, with another, or, replace missing data, with proper characters.
  • Strip undesired characters.
  • Clean whitespace characters.

In this article, we will do the following processing –

  • Remove, the ‘£’ (pound) currency, from the Book Price.
  • Replace, the ‘&’ sign wherever present in the Book title, with ‘AND’.

Scrapy – Item Loaders

In this article, we are going to discuss Item Loaders in Scrapy.

Scrapy is used for extracting data, using spiders, that crawl through the website. The obtained data can also be processed, in the form, of Scrapy Items. The Item Loaders play a significant role, in parsing the data, before populating the Item fields.  In this article, we will learn about Item Loaders.

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Data  Extraction Using Scrapy Items

We will scrape the Book Title, and, Book Price, from the Women’s fiction webpage. Scrapy, allows the use of selectors, to write the extraction code. They can be written, using CSS or XPath expressions, which traverse the entire HTML page, to get our desired data. The main objective, of scraping, is to get structured data, from unstructured sources. Usually, Scrapy spiders will yield data, in Python dictionary objects. The approach is beneficial, with a small amount of data. But, as your data increases, the complexity increases. Also, it may be desired, to process the data, before we store the content, in any file format. This is where, the Scrapy Items, come in handy. They allow the data,  to be processed, using Item Loaders. Let us write, Scrapy Item for Book Title and Price, and, the XPath expressions, for the same....

Introduction to Item Loaders

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How do Item Loaders work?

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Built-in processors:

Item loaders, allow a smoother way, to manage scraped data. Many times, we may need to process, the data we scrape. This processing can be:...

Item Loader Objects

So far we know, Item Loaders are used to parse, the data, before Item fields are populated. Let us understand, how Item Loaders work –...

Following are the methods available for ItemLoader objects:

Now, let us understand, the built-in processors, and, methods that we will use, in Item Loaders, implementation. Scrapy has six built-in processors. Let us know them –...

Nested Loaders

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Reusing and Extending Item Loaders

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Declaring Custom Item Loaders Processors

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Implementing Item Loaders to Parse Data:

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