For example:
scrapy shell http://scrapy.org/
content = hxs.select('//*[@id="content"]').extract()[0]
print content
Then, I get the following raw HTML code:
<div id="content">
<h2>Welcome to Scrapy</h2>
<h3>What is Scrapy?</h3>
<p>Scrapy is a fast high-level screen scraping and web crawling
framework, used to crawl websites and extract structured data from their
pages. It can be used for a wide range of purposes, from data mining to
monitoring and automated testing.</p>
<h3>Features</h3>
<dl>
<dt>Simple</dt>
<dt>
</dt>
<dd>Scrapy was designed with simplicity in mind, by providing the features
you need without getting in your way
</dd>
<dt>Productive</dt>
<dd>Just write the rules to extract the data from web pages and let Scrapy
crawl the entire web site for you
</dd>
<dt>Fast</dt>
<dd>Scrapy is used in production crawlers to completely scrape more than
500 retailer sites daily, all in one server
</dd>
<dt>Extensible</dt>
<dd>Scrapy was designed with extensibility in mind and so it provides
several mechanisms to plug new code without having to touch the framework
core
</dd>
<dt>Portable, open-source, 100% Python</dt>
<dd>Scrapy is completely written in Python and runs on Linux, Windows, Mac and BSD</dd>
<dt>Batteries included</dt>
<dd>Scrapy comes with lots of functionality built in. Check <a
href="http://doc.scrapy.org/en/latest/intro/overview.html#what-else">this
section</a> of the documentation for a list of them.
</dd>
<dt>Well-documented & well-tested</dt>
<dd>Scrapy is <a href="/doc/">extensively documented</a> and has an comprehensive test suite
with <a href="http://static.scrapy.org/coverage-report/">very good code
coverage</a></dd>
<dt><a href="/community">Healthy community</a></dt>
<dd>
1,500 watchers, 350 forks on Github (<a href="https://github.com/scrapy/scrapy">link</a>)<br>
700 followers on Twitter (<a href="http://twitter.com/ScrapyProject">link</a>)<br>
850 questions on StackOverflow (<a href="http://stackoverflow.com/tags/scrapy/info">link</a>)<br>
200 messages per month on mailing list (<a
href="https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!aboutgroup/scrapy-users">link</a>)<br>
40-50 users always connected to IRC channel (<a href="http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=scrapy">link</a>)
</dd>
<dt><a href="/support">Commercial support</a></dt>
<dd>A few companies provide Scrapy consulting and support</dd>
<p>Still not sure if Scrapy is what you're looking for?. Check out <a
href="http://doc.scrapy.org/en/latest/intro/overview.html">Scrapy at a
glance</a>.
</p>
<h3>Companies using Scrapy</h3>
<p>Scrapy is being used in large production environments, to crawl
thousands of sites daily. Here is a list of <a href="/companies/">Companies
using Scrapy</a>.</p>
<h3>Where to start?</h3>
<p>Start by reading <a href="http://doc.scrapy.org/en/latest/intro/overview.html">Scrapy at a glance</a>,
then <a href="/download/">download Scrapy</a> and follow the <a
href="http://doc.scrapy.org/en/latest/intro/tutorial.html">Tutorial</a>.
</p></dl>
</div>
But I want to get plain text directly from scrapy.
I do not want to use any xPath selectors to extract the p
, h2
, h3
... tags, since I am crawling a website whose main content is embedded into a table
, tbody
; recursively. It can be a tedious task to find the xPath.
Can this be implemented by a built in function in Scrapy? Or do I need external tools to convert it? I have read through all of Scrapy's docs, but have gained nothing.
This is a sample site which can convert raw HTML into plain text: http://beaker.mailchimp.com/html-to-text