How to properly use Rules, restrict_xpaths to crawl and parse URLs with scrapy?

Question

I am trying to program a crawl spider to crawl RSS feeds of a website and then parsing the meta tags of the article.

The first RSS page is a page that displays the RSS categories. I managed to extract the link because the tag is in a tag. It looks like this:

        <tr>
           <td class="xmlLink">
             <a href="http://feeds.example.com/subject1">subject1</a>
           </td>   
        </tr>
        <tr>
           <td class="xmlLink">
             <a href="http://feeds.example.com/subject2">subject2</a>
           </td>
        </tr>

Once you click that link it brings you the the articles for that RSS category that looks like this:

   <li class="regularitem">
    <h4 class="itemtitle">
        <a href="http://example.com/article1">article1</a>
    </h4>
  </li>
  <li class="regularitem">
     <h4 class="itemtitle">
        <a href="http://example.com/article2">article2</a>
     </h4>
  </li>

As You can see I can get the link with xpath again if I use the tag I want my crawler to go to the link inside that tag and parse the meta tags for me.

Here is my crawler code:

from scrapy.contrib.spiders import CrawlSpider, Rule
from scrapy.contrib.linkextractors.sgml import SgmlLinkExtractor
from scrapy.selector import HtmlXPathSelector
from tutorial.items import exampleItem


class MetaCrawl(CrawlSpider):
    name = 'metaspider'
    start_urls = ['http://example.com/tools/rss'] # urls from which the spider will start crawling
    rules = [Rule(SgmlLinkExtractor(restrict_xpaths=('//td[@class="xmlLink"]')), follow=True),
        Rule(SgmlLinkExtractor(restrict_xpaths=('//h4[@class="itemtitle"]')), callback='parse_articles')]

    def parse_articles(self, response):
        hxs = HtmlXPathSelector(response)
        meta = hxs.select('//meta')
        items = []
        for m in meta:
           item = exampleItem()
           item['link'] = response.url
           item['meta_name'] =m.select('@name').extract()
           item['meta_value'] = m.select('@content').extract()
           items.append(item)
        return items

However this is the output when I run the crawler:

DEBUG: Crawled (200) <GET http://http://feeds.example.com/subject1> (referer: http://example.com/tools/rss)
DEBUG: Crawled (200) <GET http://http://feeds.example.com/subject2> (referer: http://example.com/tools/rss)

What am I doing wrong here? I've been reading the documentation over and over again but I feel like I keep overlooking something. Any help would be appreciated.

EDIT: Added: items.append(item) . Had forgotten it in original post. EDIT: : I've tried this as well and it resulted in the same output:

from scrapy.contrib.spiders import CrawlSpider, Rule
from scrapy.contrib.linkextractors.sgml import SgmlLinkExtractor
from scrapy.selector import HtmlXPathSelector
from reuters.items import exampleItem
from scrapy.http import Request

class MetaCrawl(CrawlSpider):
    name = 'metaspider'
    start_urls = ['http://example.com/tools/rss'] # urls from which the spider will start crawling
    rules = [Rule(SgmlLinkExtractor(allow=[r'.*',], restrict_xpaths=('//td[@class="xmlLink"]')), follow=True),
             Rule(SgmlLinkExtractor(allow=[r'.*'], restrict_xpaths=('//h4[@class="itemtitle"]')),follow=True),]


    def parse(self, response):       
        hxs = HtmlXPathSelector(response)
        meta = hxs.select('//td[@class="xmlLink"]/a/@href')
        for m in meta:
            yield Request(m.extract(), callback = self.parse_link)


    def parse_link(self, response):       
        hxs = HtmlXPathSelector(response)
        meta = hxs.select('//h4[@class="itemtitle"]/a/@href')
        for m in meta:
            yield Request(m.extract(), callback = self.parse_again)    

    def parse_again(self, response):
        hxs = HtmlXPathSelector(response)
        meta = hxs.select('//meta')
        items = []
        for m in meta:
            item = exampleItem()
            item['link'] = response.url
            item['meta_name'] = m.select('@name').extract()
            item['meta_value'] = m.select('@content').extract()
            items.append(item)
        return items

Solution

You've returned an empty items, you need to append item to items.
You can also yield item in the loop.

Comments

[Marc]

Yes, you are right i forgot to put the "items.append(item)" into the post. However it still gets me the same output. I will do an edit now.