Lidle Scrapy Scraper

This project is a web scraper built using Scrapy to extract product information from Lidle's website.

Project Overview

The Lidle Scrapy Scraper is designed to efficiently scrape product data from Lidle's website. The project consists of several components, including spiders, pipelines, middlewares, and settings configurations, to ensure robust data extraction and handling.

Complexities

1. Spider Middleware:

   • Managing spider lifecycle events.
   • Handling exceptions and controlling the flow of requests and responses.

2. Downloader Middleware:

   • Intercepting and processing requests and responses.
   • Managing exceptions during the request-response cycle.

3. Item Pipeline:

   • Processing scraped items for storage or further processing.

4. Settings Configuration:

   • Configuring Scrapy settings such as spider modules, encoding, and obeying robots.txt.

Solutions

1. Spider Middleware: Implemented custom middleware to handle spider events and exceptions efficiently.

   • Example: process_spider_input, process_spider_output methods to manage the spider's input and output data flow.

2. Downloader Middleware: Developed middleware to process requests and responses seamlessly.

   • Example: process_request, process_response methods to handle request-response cycles.

3. Item Pipeline: Created a pipeline to process and store scraped items.

   • Example: process_item method to handle item processing.

4. Settings Configuration: Configured essential Scrapy settings to optimize scraping performance.

   • Example: Disabled ROBOTSTXT_OBEY for broader web scraping.

Challenges

• Exception Handling: Ensuring robust exception handling in spider and downloader middleware to avoid scraping interruptions.
• Data Integrity: Maintaining the integrity and consistency of scraped data through efficient pipeline processing.
• Performance Optimization: Tuning Scrapy settings to balance performance and compliance with website scraping policies.

Getting Started

To get started with the Lidle Scrapy Scraper:

1. Clone the Repository:

   git clone https://github.com/faisal-fida/Lidle-Scrapy-Scraper.git
   cd Lidle-Scrapy-Scraper

2. Install Dependencies:

   pip install -r requirements.txt

3. Run the Spider:

   scrapy crawl <spider_name>