Can scrapy be used to scrape dynamic content from websites that are using AJAX?

Question

I have recently been learning Python and am dipping my hand into building a web-scraper. It\'s nothing fancy at all; its only purpose is to get the data off of a betting we

Answer 1

I was using a custom downloader middleware, but wasn't very happy with it, as I didn't manage to make the cache work with it.

A better approach was to implement a custom download handler.

There is a working example here. It looks like this:

# encoding: utf-8
from __future__ import unicode_literals

from scrapy import signals
from scrapy.signalmanager import SignalManager
from scrapy.responsetypes import responsetypes
from scrapy.xlib.pydispatch import dispatcher
from selenium import webdriver
from six.moves import queue
from twisted.internet import defer, threads
from twisted.python.failure import Failure


class PhantomJSDownloadHandler(object):

    def __init__(self, settings):
        self.options = settings.get('PHANTOMJS_OPTIONS', {})

        max_run = settings.get('PHANTOMJS_MAXRUN', 10)
        self.sem = defer.DeferredSemaphore(max_run)
        self.queue = queue.LifoQueue(max_run)

        SignalManager(dispatcher.Any).connect(self._close, signal=signals.spider_closed)

    def download_request(self, request, spider):
        """use semaphore to guard a phantomjs pool"""
        return self.sem.run(self._wait_request, request, spider)

    def _wait_request(self, request, spider):
        try:
            driver = self.queue.get_nowait()
        except queue.Empty:
            driver = webdriver.PhantomJS(**self.options)

        driver.get(request.url)
        # ghostdriver won't response when switch window until page is loaded
        dfd = threads.deferToThread(lambda: driver.switch_to.window(driver.current_window_handle))
        dfd.addCallback(self._response, driver, spider)
        return dfd

    def _response(self, _, driver, spider):
        body = driver.execute_script("return document.documentElement.innerHTML")
        if body.startswith(""):  # cannot access response header in Selenium
            body = driver.execute_script("return document.documentElement.textContent")
        url = driver.current_url
        respcls = responsetypes.from_args(url=url, body=body[:100].encode('utf8'))
        resp = respcls(url=url, body=body, encoding="utf-8")

        response_failed = getattr(spider, "response_failed", None)
        if response_failed and callable(response_failed) and response_failed(resp, driver):
            driver.close()
            return defer.fail(Failure())
        else:
            self.queue.put(driver)
            return defer.succeed(resp)

    def _close(self):
        while not self.queue.empty():
            driver = self.queue.get_nowait()
            driver.close()

Suppose your scraper is called "scraper". If you put the mentioned code inside a file called handlers.py on the root of the "scraper" folder, then you could add to your settings.py:

DOWNLOAD_HANDLERS = {
    'http': 'scraper.handlers.PhantomJSDownloadHandler',
    'https': 'scraper.handlers.PhantomJSDownloadHandler',
}

And voilà, the JS parsed DOM, with scrapy cache, retries, etc.