CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonhtmlregexweb-scrapingscrapy
vrtech77
vrtech77

Reputation: 159

Code to remove text from Scrapy output

Below is a sample piece of HTML code that I want to scrape with scrapy.

<body>
<h2 class="post-title entry-title">Sample Header</h2>
    <div class="entry clearfix">
        <div class="sample1">
            <p>Hello</p>
        </div>
        <!--start comment-->
        <div class="sample2">
            <p>World</p>
        </div>
        <!--end comment-->
    </div>
<ul class="post-categories">
<li><a href="123.html">Category1</a></li>
<li><a href="456.html">Category2</a></li>
<li><a href="789.html">Category3</a></li>
</ul>
</body>

Right now I am using the below working scrapy code:

from scrapy.contrib.spiders import CrawlSpider, Rule
from scrapy.contrib.linkextractors.sgml import SgmlLinkExtractor
from scrapy.selector import HtmlXPathSelector
from isbullshit.items import IsBullshitItem

class IsBullshitSpider(CrawlSpider):
    name = 'isbullshit'
    start_urls = ['http://sample.com']
    rules = [Rule(SgmlLinkExtractor(allow=[r'page/\d+']), follow=True), 
        Rule(SgmlLinkExtractor(allow=[r'\w+']), callback='parse_blogpost')]

    def parse_blogpost(self, response):
        hxs = HtmlXPathSelector(response)
        item = IsBullshitItem()
        item['title'] = hxs.select('//h2[@class="post-title entry-title"]/text()').extract()[0]
        item['tag'] = hxs.select('//ul[@class="post-categories"]/li[1]/a/text()').extract()[0]
        item['article_html'] = hxs.select("//div[@class='entry clearfix']").extract()[0]
        return item

It gives me the following xml output:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<items>
    <item>

        <article_html>
        <div class="entry clearfix">
        <div class="sample1">
            <p>Hello</p>
        </div>
        <!--start comment-->
        <div class="sample2">
            <p>World</p>
        </div>
        <!--end comment-->
        </div>      
        </article_html>

        <tag>
        Category1
        </tag>

        <title>
        Sample Header
        </title>

    </item>
</items>

I want to know how to achieve the following output:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<items>
    <item>

        <article_html>
        <div class="entry clearfix">
        <div class="sample1">
            <p>Hello</p>
        </div>
        <!--start comment-->
        <!--end comment-->
        </div>      
        </article_html>

        <tag>
        Category1,Category2,Category3
        </tag>

        <title>
        Sample Header
        </title>

    </item>
</items>

Note: The number of categories depends on the post. In the above example, there are 3 categories. There could be more or less.

Help would be much appreciated. Cheers.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1929

Answers (2)

memoselyk
memoselyk

Reputation: 4118

That's not a job for scrapy's selectors. If you want to manipulate a DOM, you are better off with BeautifulSoup:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

[...]

item = hxs.select("//div[@class='entry clearfix']").extract()[0]

# Removing div#sample1
soup = BeautifulSoup(item)

# Select supports CSS selection
tags = soup.select('div.sample1')[0]  # Assume at least one element found

tags[0].extract()  # remove element in-place

sub_total = soup.div.encode()

The second one is a little tricker since couldn't get it working with extracts but this is one alternative:

soup = BeautifulSoup(item)

temp = soup.div.div.extract()  # Get inner tag of interest

soup.div.clear()  # Remove all children tags

soup.div.append(temp)  # Insert temp tag

sub_total = soup.div.encode()

I know this feels too manual and verbose, but at least is one alternative.

Upvotes: 0

eLRuLL
eLRuLL

Reputation: 18799

sel = Selector(text=u"<div class="entry clearfix">
    <div class="sample1">
        <p>Hello</p>
    </div>
    <!--start comment-->
    <div class="sample2">
        <p>World</p>
    </div>
    <!--end comment-->
</div>")
total = sel.xpath('//div[@class="entry clearfix"]').extract_first()

First Part

unwanted_part = sel.xpath('//div[@class="sample2"]').extract_first()
new_total = total.replace(unwanted_part, '')

Second Part

comments = sel.xpath('//div[@class="entry clearfix"]/comment()').extract()
new_total = total
for comment in comments:
    new_total = new_total.replace(comment, '')

I don't think this can be done just using xpath or css.

Upvotes: 2

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