🔥You Can’t Carry On Without These Web Scraping Tips🔥 | 3 Scrapy & Python Tips To enhance your Web Scraping 100%

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Avoid getting deemed as a bot, handle API responses with different request methods, and look like a professional.

If you’re starting at Scrapy and don’t know where to look (believe me, I know what it feels like!), these tips are ideal for you.

1. Pass Arguments From One Function To The Other

This is pretty simple!

Most of the time, we want to send an argument from one function to the other and we don’t know how to. The answer is simple: callbacks and meta parameters.

These two can be used in Scrapy Spider’s functions to pass one argument to another function.

Callback

def parse(self, response):
    """
    Here you do the interesting stuff...
    """
    apples = 2
    yield scrapy.Request("Next url", callback=self.parse_issue_page, cb_kwargs={"app":apples})

#Next function:

def parse_issue_page(self, response, apples):
    """
    Here you'd do even more interesting stuff!
    Or non-interesting stuff, us devs are really boring (except me...)
    """
    apple_tree = apples**2
    yield apple_tree

Meta

def parse(self, response):
    """
    Here you do the interesting stuff...
    """
    
    apples = 2
    
    yield scrapy.Request("Next url", callback=self.parse_issue_page, meta={"app":apples})

def parse_issue_page(self, response):
    """
    Here you'd do even more interesting stuff!
    Or non-interesting stuff, us devs are really boring (except me...)
    """
    
    apple_tree = response.meta["app"]**2
    
    yield apple_tree

2. Use User-Agents to avoid suspicion

Everybody knows this tip!

But it is essential to mention it. If you don’t want to get caught while scraping in Scrapy, you must change your user agent from the default to another one… I mean any other UA will do 😅

To do this, you must go to the Scrapy Spider settings and set the user agent variable to your desired user agent:

# Insettings.py file

# Crawl responsibly by identifying yourself (and your website) on the user-agent
USER_AGENT = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/121.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
#Or any other UA you might want to use, I'm not obligating you to use that one 😜

3. Handle Different Request Methods

With these tips, you’ll be able to scrape websites with Scrapy and retrieve the data from APIs that require either POST requests or any request type other than GET (the default).

Incredibly useful 😎

On the shell:

#In scrapy shell

fetch(URL)

request = request.replace(method="POST")

fetch(request)

On the spider:

# On the spider's class

def start_requests(self):
yield scrapy.Request("www.nva_the_great.com",
                        callback=self.parse,
                        method="POST")
def parse(self, response):
  """
  Here goes that kind of magic!
  """
  pass

This is all for today. These tips might be quite simple but will enhance your web scraping skills a whole lot, at least they did for me 😆

Don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel if you want to dig deeper into web scraping and automation topics, and hear my beautiful voice 🤭

Nehuen,

Cheers!