Scrapy is a powerful web scraping framework written in Python. It allows you to extract data from websites, APIs, and other sources. One of the ways to store the scraped data is by exporting it in XML format. In this blog post, we will explore how to configure Scrapy to output XML files.

Step 1: Create a Scrapy Project

First, let’s create a new Scrapy project using the following command in your terminal:

$ scrapy startproject myproject

This will create a new directory named “myproject” with the basic structure of a Scrapy project.

Step 2: Define the Spider

Next, we need to define the spider that will crawl the website and extract the data. Open the “spiders” directory inside your project folder and create a new Python file, for example, “myspider.py”.

In this file, we will define the spider class by importing the necessary modules and extending the scrapy.Spider class. Here’s an example:

import scrapy

class MySpider(scrapy.Spider):
    name = 'myspider'

    def start_requests(self):
        urls = [
            'https://www.example.com/page1',
            'https://www.example.com/page2',
        ]
        for url in urls:
            yield scrapy.Request(url=url, callback=self.parse)

    def parse(self, response):
        # Extract data from the response
        # and yield the scraped items
        pass

Replace the URLs with the ones you want to scrape and implement the parse method to extract the desired data from the response.

Step 3: Configure XML Output

To configure Scrapy to output XML files, open the “settings.py” file in your project folder. Add the following lines:

FEED_FORMAT = 'xml'
FEED_URI = 'output.xml'

In the above example, we set the FEED_FORMAT to 'xml' to indicate that we want to output XML files. We also set the FEED_URI to 'output.xml', which is the filename of the exported file.

Step 4: Run the Spider

To run the spider and export the scraped data in XML format, use the following command:

$ scrapy crawl myspider

Replace "myspider" with the name of your spider defined in the spider class.

Conclusion

By following the steps mentioned above, you can configure Scrapy to output scraped data into XML files. This allows you to easily analyze and process the extracted data in a structured format.

Happy web scraping!