Order a json by field using scrapy

Question

I have created a spider to scrape problems from projecteuler.net. Here I have concluded my answer to a related question with

I launch this with the command scrapy crawl euler -o euler.json and it outputs an array of unordered json objects, everyone corrisponding to a single problem: this is fine for me because I'm going to process it with javascript, even if I think resolving the ordering problem via scrapy can be very simple.

But unfortunately, ordering items to write in json by scrapy (I need ascending order by id field) seem not to be so simple. I've studied every single component (middlewares, pipelines, exporters, signals, etc...) but no one seems useful for this purpose. I'm arrived at the conclusion that a solution to solve this problem doesn't exist at all in scrapy (except, maybe, a very elaborated trick), and you are forced to order things in a second phase. Do you agree, or do you have some idea? I copy here the code of my scraper.

Spider:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import scrapy
from eulerscraper.items import Problem
from scrapy.loader import ItemLoader


class EulerSpider(scrapy.Spider):
    name = 'euler'
    allowed_domains = ['projecteuler.net']
    start_urls = ["https://projecteuler.net/archives"]

    def parse(self, response):
        numpag = response.css("div.pagination a[href]::text").extract()
        maxpag = int(numpag[len(numpag) - 1])

        for href in response.css("table#problems_table a::attr(href)").extract():
            next_page = "https://projecteuler.net/" + href
            yield response.follow(next_page, self.parse_problems)

        for i in range(2, maxpag + 1):
            next_page = "https://projecteuler.net/archives;page=" + str(i)
            yield response.follow(next_page, self.parse_next)

        return [scrapy.Request("https://projecteuler.net/archives", self.parse)]

    def parse_next(self, response):
        for href in response.css("table#problems_table a::attr(href)").extract():
            next_page = "https://projecteuler.net/" + href
            yield response.follow(next_page, self.parse_problems)

    def parse_problems(self, response):
        l = ItemLoader(item=Problem(), response=response)
        l.add_css("title", "h2")
        l.add_css("id", "#problem_info")
        l.add_css("content", ".problem_content")

        yield l.load_item()

Item:

import re

import scrapy
from scrapy.loader.processors import MapCompose, Compose
from w3lib.html import remove_tags


def extract_first_number(text):
    i = re.search('\d+', text)
    return int(text[i.start():i.end()])


def array_to_value(element):
    return element[0]


class Problem(scrapy.Item):
    id = scrapy.Field(
        input_processor=MapCompose(remove_tags, extract_first_number),
        output_processor=Compose(array_to_value)
    )
    title = scrapy.Field(input_processor=MapCompose(remove_tags))
    content = scrapy.Field()

Answer 1

If I needed my output file to be sorted (I will assume you have a valid reason to want this), I'd probably write a custom exporter.

This is how Scrapy's built-in JsonItemExporter is implemented.
With a few simple changes, you can modify it to add the items to a list in export_item(), and then sort the items and write out the file in finish_exporting().

Since you're only scraping a few hundred items, the downsides of storing a list of them and not writing to a file until the crawl is done shouldn't be a problem to you.

Answer 2

By now I've found a working solution using pipeline:

import json

class JsonWriterPipeline(object):

    def open_spider(self, spider):
        self.list_items = []
        self.file = open('euler.json', 'w')

    def close_spider(self, spider):
        ordered_list = [None for i in range(len(self.list_items))]

        self.file.write("[\n")

        for i in self.list_items:
            ordered_list[int(i['id']-1)] = json.dumps(dict(i))

        for i in ordered_list:
            self.file.write(str(i)+",\n")

        self.file.write("]\n")
        self.file.close()

    def process_item(self, item, spider):
        self.list_items.append(item)
        return item

Though it may be non optimal, because the guide suggests in another example:

The purpose of JsonWriterPipeline is just to introduce how to write item pipelines. If you really want to store all scraped items into a JSON file you should use the Feed exports.