Python: Scrapy spider doesn't return results?

Question

I know I need to work on my selectors in order to tune in on more specific data, but I don't know why my csv is EMPTY.

my parse class:

class MySpider(BaseSpider):
    name =  "wikipedia"
    allowed_domains = ["en.wikipedia.org/"]
    start_urls = ["http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_in_film"]

    def parse(self, response):
        hxs = HtmlXPathSelector(response)
        titles = hxs.select('//table[@class="wikitable sortable jquery-tablesorter"], [@style="margin:auto; margin:auto;"]')
        items = []
        for title in titles:
            item = WikipediaItem()
            item["title"] = title.select("td/text()").extract()
            item["url"] = title.select("a/text()").extract()
            items.append(item)
        return items

The html I'm trying to crawl:

<table class="wikitable sortable" style="margin:auto; margin:auto;">
<caption>Highest-grossing films of 2014</caption>
<tr>
<th>Rank</th>
<th>Title</th>
<th>Studio</th>
<th>Worldwide gross</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<th style="text-align:center;">1</th>
<td><i><a href="/wiki/Transformers:_Age_of_Extinction" title="Transformers: Age of Extinction">Transformers: Age of Extinction</a></i></td>
<td><a href="/wiki/Paramount_Pictures" title="Paramount Pictures">Paramount Pictures</a></td>
<td>$1,091,404,499</td>
</tr>

And this section within the html repeats over and over for each film, so it should grab all once selected correctly:

    <tr>
    <th style="text-align:center;">1</th>
    <td><i><a href="/wiki/Transformers:_Age_of_Extinction" title="Transformers: Age of Extinction">Transformers: Age of Extinction</a></i></td>
    <td><a href="/wiki/Paramount_Pictures" title="Paramount Pictures">Paramount Pictures</a></td>
    <td>$1,091,404,499</td>
    </tr>

I know the issue isn't in exporting because even in my shell it says "Crawl 0 pages, Scraped 0 Items" so really nothing is getting touched.

Answer 1

1. The table is not the repeatable element... it is the table row.

2. You will need to change your code to select the table rows ie

    titles = hxs.select('//tr') 

3. Then loop through them and use xpath to get your data

    for title in titles: item = WikipediaItem() item["title"] = title.xpath("./td/i/a/@title")[0] item["url"] = title.xpath("./td/i/a/@href")[0] items.append(item)