How to stop scrapy spider after certain number of requests?

Question

I am developing an simple scraper to get 9 gag posts and its images but due to some technical difficulties iam unable to stop the scraper and it keeps on scraping

Answer 1

First: Use self.count and initialize outside of parse. Then don't prevent the parsing of the items, but generating new requests. See the following code:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import scrapy
from scrapy import Item, Field


class GagItem(Item):
    entry_id = Field()
    url = Field()
    votes = Field()
    comments = Field()
    title = Field()
    img_url = Field()


class FirstSpider(scrapy.Spider):

    name = "first"
    allowed_domains = ["9gag.com"]
    start_urls = ('http://www.9gag.com/', )

    last_gag_id = None
    COUNT_MAX = 30
    count = 0

    def parse(self, response):

        for article in response.xpath('//article'):
            gag_id = article.xpath('@data-entry-id').extract()
            ninegag_item = GagItem()
            ninegag_item['entry_id'] = gag_id[0]
            ninegag_item['url'] = article.xpath('@data-entry-url').extract()[0]
            ninegag_item['votes'] = article.xpath('@data-entry-votes').extract()[0]
            ninegag_item['comments'] = article.xpath('@data-entry-comments').extract()[0]
            ninegag_item['title'] = article.xpath('.//h2/a/text()').extract()[0].strip()
            ninegag_item['img_url'] = article.xpath('.//div[1]/a/img/@src').extract()
            self.last_gag_id = gag_id[0]
            self.count = self.count + 1
            yield ninegag_item

        if (self.count < self.COUNT_MAX):
            next_url = 'http://9gag.com/?id=%s&c=10' % self.last_gag_id
            yield scrapy.Request(url=next_url, callback=self.parse)