Scrapy Tips from the Pros
I love ScrapingHub (and use them) but these tips go completely against my own experience.<p>Whenever I've tried to extract data like that inside Spiders I would invariably (and 50,000 URLs later) come to the realization that my .parse() ing code did not cover some weird edge case on the scraped resource and that all data extracted was now basically untrustworthy and worthless. How to re-run all that with more robust logic? Re-start from URL #1<p>The only solution I've found is to completely de-couple scraping from parsing. parse() captures the url, the response body, request and response headers and then runs with the loot.<p>Once you've secured it though, these libraries look great.<p>PS: If you haven't used ScrapingHub you definitely should give it a try, they let you use their awesome & finely-tuned infrastructure completely for free. One of my first spiders ran for 180,000 pages and 50,000 items extracted for $0.