Scraping dynamic content using python-Scrapy

Question

Disclaimer: I've seen numerous other similar posts on StackOverflow and tried to do it the same way but was they don't seem to work on this website.

I'm using Python-Scrapy for getting data from koovs.com.

However, I'm not able to get the product size, which is dynamically generated. Specifically, if someone could guide me a little on getting the 'Not available' size tag from the drop-down menu on this link, I'd be grateful.

I am able to get the size list statically, but doing that I only get the list of sizes but not which of them are available.

Answer 1

You can also solve it with ScrapyJS (no need for selenium and a real browser):

This library provides Scrapy+JavaScript integration using Splash.

Follow the installation instructions for Splash and ScrapyJS, start the splash docker container:

$ docker run -p 8050:8050 scrapinghub/splash

Put the following settings into settings.py:

SPLASH_URL = 'http://192.168.59.103:8050' 

DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES = {
    'scrapyjs.SplashMiddleware': 725,
}

DUPEFILTER_CLASS = 'scrapyjs.SplashAwareDupeFilter'

And here is your sample spider that is able to see the size availability information:

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


class ExampleSpider(scrapy.Spider):
    name = "example"
    allowed_domains = ["koovs.com"]
    start_urls = (
        'http://www.koovs.com/only-onlall-stripe-ls-shirt-59554.html?from=category-651&skuid=236376',
    )

    def start_requests(self):
        for url in self.start_urls:
            yield scrapy.Request(url, self.parse, meta={
                'splash': {
                    'endpoint': 'render.html',
                    'args': {'wait': 0.5}
                }
            })

    def parse(self, response):
        for option in response.css("div.select-size select.sizeOptions option")[1:]:
            print option.xpath("text()").extract()

Here is what is printed on the console:

[u'S / 34 -- Not Available']
[u'L / 40 -- Not Available']
[u'L / 42']