3

I want to crawl a local xml file that I have located in my Downloads folder with scrapy, use xpath to extract the relevant information.

Using the scrapy intro as a guide 

2016-01-24 12:38:53 [scrapy] DEBUG: Retrying <GET file://home/sayth/Downloads/20160123RAND0.xml> (failed 2 times): [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/sayth/Downloads/20160123RAND0.xml'
2016-01-24 12:38:53 [scrapy] DEBUG: Gave up retrying <GET file://home/sayth/Downloads/20160123RAND0.xml> (failed 3 times): [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/sayth/Downloads/20160123RAND0.xml'
2016-01-24 12:38:53 [scrapy] ERROR: Error downloading <GET file://home/sayth/Downloads/20160123RAND0.xml>

I have tried several version of the below however i am not able to get the start url to accept my file.

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import scrapy


class MyxmlSpider(scrapy.Spider):
    name = "myxml"
    allowed_domains = ["file://home/sayth/Downloads"]
    start_urls = (
        'http://www.file://home/sayth/Downloads/20160123RAND0.xml',
    )

    def parse(self, response):
        for file in response.xpath('//meeting'):
            full_url = response.urljoin(href.extract())
            yield scrapy.Request(full_url, callback=self.parse_question)

    def parse_xml(self, response):
        yield {
            'name': response.xpath('//meeting/race').extract()
        }

Just to confirm I do have the file in that location

sayth@sayth-HP-EliteBook-2560p : ~/Downloads
[0] % ls -a
.                                                              Building a Responsive Website with Bootstrap [Video].zip
..                                                             codemirror.zip
1.1 Situation Of Long Term Gain.xls                            Complete-Python-Bootcamp-master.zip
2008 Racedata.xls                                              Cox Plate 2005.xls
20160123RAND0.xml
sayth
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2 Answers2

8

Don't specify the allowed_domains at all and use 3 slashes after the protocol:

start_urls = ["file:///home/sayth/Downloads/20160123RAND0.xml"]
alecxe
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2

An absolute path of the file has to be used for specifying the local file with the file:// protocol.
I personally recommend using pathlib for this instead of specifying the absolute yourself with a string.

Here's a usage example

import pathlib

start_urls = [
  pathlib.Path(os.path.abspath('20160123RAND0.xml')).as_uri()
]

as_uri() method converts path to file:// uri

Florent Roques
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