Python Forum

Hello,
downloaded scrapy and went through the tutorials and still trying to understand the selector
aspect of scraping. So I thought scrape a different quotes web page:
website
I created a new project and spider:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import scrapy


class InspiderSpider(scrapy.Spider):
    name = 'inspider'
    allowed_domains = ['https://www.keepinspiring.me/famous-quotes/']
    start_urls = ['https://www.keepinspiring.me/famous-quotes//']

    def parse(self, response):
        for quotes in response.css('div.author-quotes'):
            yield {
                'text': quotes.css('span.text::text').extract_first(),
                'author': quotes.css('span.quote-author-name::text').extract_first()
            }

I can extract the authors but no luck on the quote.
output:

Output:
{"text": null, "author": "-Dr. Suess"},
{"text": null, "author": "-Marilyn Monroe"},
{"text": null, "author": null},
{"text": null, "author": "-Stephen King"},
{"text": null, "author": "-Mark Caine"},
{"text": null, "author": "-Helen Keller"},
.....

when I examine the quote element and copy xpath I get:

Output:
//*[@id="entry-4812"]/div/div[1]/div[6]/text()

any help appreciated,
Joe

span.text::text tries selecting the text of a span with class text.
Such an element doesn't exist, the text is placed directly in the div.

A css selector that would work here would be simply ::text.
This technically selects all the text nodes inside the div (including the author), but .extract_first() will give you only the thing you are after.

An alternative is using an xpath such as ./text().

A couple of non-selector-related notes:

• Your allowed_domains is being ignored since it contains full urls instead of domains (it's optional, so your code still works)
  
• You should use .get() instead of .extract_first(), that's been the recommended api for a while now
  

thanks, I got quotes and authors.
Joe