I've been tasked with pulling pdf files from websites using Scrapy. I'm not new to Python, but Scrapy is a very new to me. I've been experimenting with the console and a few rudimentary spiders. I've found and modified this code:
import urlparse
import scrapy
from scrapy.http import Request
class pwc_tax(scrapy.Spider):
name = "pwc_tax"
allowed_domains = ["www.pwc.com"]
start_urls = ["http://www.pwc.com/us/en/tax-services/publications/research-and-insights.html"]
def parse(self, response):
base_url = "http://www.pwc.com/us/en/tax-services/publications/research-and-insights.html"
for a in response.xpath('//a[@href]/@href'):
link = a.extract()
if link.endswith('.pdf'):
link = urlparse.urljoin(base_url, link)
yield Request(link, callback=self.save_pdf)
def save_pdf(self, response):
path = response.url.split('/')[-1]
with open(path, 'wb') as f:
f.write(response.body)
I run this code at the command line with
scrapy crawl mySpider
and I get nothing back. I didn't create a scrapy item because I want to crawl and download the file, no meta data. I would appreciate any help on this.