Scrapy web crawling going bad

Question

I'm new to scrapy and trying to understand it by scraping yellowpages.com website.

My objective is to write a python code to enter the search fields (business and the location) of the yellowpages.com homepage and then scrape the subsequent urls.

My code looks like this :

import scrapy
from scrapy.spiders import Spider
from scrapy.selector import Selector
from spider.items import Website

class YellowPages(Spider):
    name = "yellow"
    allowed_domains = ["yellowpages.com"]
    start_urls = [
        "http://www.yellowpages.com/"
    ]

    def parse(self, response):
        return scrapy.FormRequest.from_response(
            response,
            formxpath="//form[@id='search-form']",
            formdata={
                "query":"business",
                "location" : "78735" },
            callback=self.after_results
        )

    def after_results(self, response):
        self.logger.info("info msg")

I want to search for "business" at location "78735". However, these are not the values that are passed to the website. My log looks like this :

2016-01-28 23:55:36 [scrapy] DEBUG: Crawled (200) <GET http://www.yellowpages.com/> (referer: None)

2016-01-28 23:55:36 [scrapy] DEBUG: Crawled (200) <GET http://www.yellowpages.com/search?search_terms=&geo_location_terms=Los+Angeles%2C+CA&query=business&location=78735> (referer: http://www.yellowpages.com/)

In the second url, the terms Los+Angeles is inserted somehow. When I try to enter the search fields manually and submit, this is how the url supposed to look like this:

http://www.yellowpages.com/search?search_terms=business&geo_location_terms=78735

Can someone tell me what's going wrong and how to fix it?

Thanks a lot.

Just for reference, here is the part of the HTML source code of the yellowpages.com home page

<div class="search-bar"><form id="search-form" action="/search" method="GET"><div><label><span>What do you want to find?</span><input id="query" type="text" value="" placeholder="What do you want to find?" autocomplete="off" data-onempty="recent-searches" name="search_terms" tabindex="1"/></label><ul id="recent-searches" class="search-dropdown recent-searches"><li class="search-hint">Search by<b> business name,</b> or<b> keyword</b></li></ul><ul id="autosuggest-term" data-analytics='{"moi":105}' class="search-dropdown autosuggest-term"></ul></div><em>near</em><div><label><span>Where?</span> <input id="location"type="text" value="78735" placeholder="Where?" autocomplete="off" data-onempty="menu-location" name="geo_location_terms" tabindex="2"/></label>

Answer 1

Set the search_terms and geo_location_terms form parameters:

def parse(self, response):
    return scrapy.FormRequest.from_response(
        response,
        formxpath="//form[@id='search-form']",
        formdata={
            "search_terms": "business",
            "geo_location_terms" : "78735"},
        callback=self.after_results
    )

Tested with the following spider:

import scrapy
from scrapy.spiders import Spider


class YellowPages(Spider):
    name = "yellow"
    allowed_domains = ["yellowpages.com"]
    start_urls = [
        "http://www.yellowpages.com/"
    ]

    def parse(self, response):
        return scrapy.FormRequest.from_response(
            response,
            formxpath="//form[@id='search-form']",
            formdata={
                "search_terms":"business",
                "geo_location_terms" : "78735"},
            callback=self.after_results
        )

    def after_results(self, response):
        for result in response.css("div.result a[itemprop=name]::text").extract():
            print(result)

Prints the list of businesses in "Austin, TX":

Prism Solutions
Time Agent
Stuart Consulting
Jones REX L
Medical Informatics & Tech Inc
J E Andrews INC
...
Hicks Consulting