Normalize space for list items and extract as array using Scrapy

Question

I am looking for an efficient way to extract list items as an array. They need to be stripped of any extra spaces. Currently I am doing this:

actions = []
actions_list = sel.xpath('//div[label="Actions Taken"]/article/div/ul')
action_items = actions_list.xpath('li')
for a in action_items:
    actions.append(a.xpath('normalize-space(text())')[0].extract())

The actions array gets stored in my database. Is there a more efficient way of doing this in Scrapy?

Answer 1

The following xpath should do the same you are doing:

sel.xpath('normalize-space(//div[label="Actions Taken"]/article/div/ul/li/text()[0])').extract()

but it depends on the page