extra data between html tags using scrapy (not xpath)

Question

I am writing a scrapy spider and I want the user to be able to supply an html tag like <span class="someclass"></span> or <a style="somestuff"></a> and then use these tags to extract the text in betwen and put that in my results. I really don't want the user to have to supply Xpath. I understand it may be easier to code with xpath but I will make my spider available to users who are not so tech savvy.

How would you do that?

Answer 1

Have a look at this

http://django-dynamic-scraper.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

I have tried it works good and you can link with django models as well.

You can get many ideas from there , how to take user input