Two Python files are part of a web scraping project using Scrapy to extract data from The New York Times website (www.nytimes.com
). Here's a brief explanation of what each file does:
-
nytimes-first-page.py
:- This file defines a Scrapy spider named
NytimesSpider
. - The spider is configured to crawl the New York Times website (
www.nytimes.com
). - In the
parse
method, it extracts data from the main page of The New York Times website. - It targets sections with the class
story-wrapper
and extracts information about articles within those sections. - For each article, it extracts the title, article URL, and summary, and yields this data as a Python dictionary.
- The
cleanString
function is used to clean the extracted text data by removing any unnecessary characters or whitespace.
- This file defines a Scrapy spider named
-
nytimes-articles.py
:- This file extends the functionality of the previous spider.
- In addition to parsing the main page, it also follows the links to individual articles and extracts further information.
- After extracting information about an article from the main page, it extracts the article's URL and follows it to the article page.
- In the
parse_article
method, it extracts the title, authors, and contents of the article. - The extracted data is then yielded as a Python dictionary.
- Again, the
cleanString
function is used to clean the extracted text data.
The results of the web scraping process are stored in a JSON file with the corresponding names. Each JSON file contains structured data extracted from The New York Times website, including article titles, URLs, summaries, authors, and contents.