itemloaders

itemloaders provide a convenient mechanism for populating data records. Its design provides a flexible, efficient and easy mechanism for extending and overriding different field parsing rules, either by raw data, or by source format (HTML, XML, etc) without becoming a nightmare to maintain.

To install itemloaders, run:

pip install itemloaders

Note

Under the hood, itemloaders uses itemadapter as a common interface. This means you can use any of the types supported by itemadapter here.

Warning

dataclasses and attrs support is still experimental. Please, refer to default_item_class in the API Reference for more information.

Getting Started with itemloaders

To use an Item Loader, you must first instantiate it. You can either instantiate it with a dict-like object (item) or without one, in which case an item is automatically instantiated in the Item Loader __init__ method using the item class specified in the ItemLoader.default_item_class attribute.

Then, you start collecting values into the Item Loader, typically using CSS or XPath Selectors. You can add more than one value to the same item field; the Item Loader will know how to “join” those values later using a proper processing function.

Note

Collected data is stored internally as lists, allowing to add several values to the same field. If an item argument is passed when creating a loader, each of the item’s values will be stored as-is if it’s already an iterable, or wrapped with a list if it’s a single value.

Here is a typical Item Loader usage:

from itemloaders import ItemLoader
from parsel import Selector

html_data = '''
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <title>Some random product page</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <div class="product_name">Some random product page</div>
        <p id="price">$ 100.12</p>
    </body>
</html>
'''
l = ItemLoader(selector=Selector(html_data))
l.add_xpath('name', '//div[@class="product_name"]/text()')
l.add_xpath('name', '//div[@class="product_title"]/text()')
l.add_css('price', '#price::text')
l.add_value('last_updated', 'today') # you can also use literal values
item = l.load_item()
item
# {'name': ['Some random product page'], 'price': ['$ 100.12'], 'last_updated': ['today']}

By quickly looking at that code, we can see the name field is being extracted from two different XPath locations in the page:

  1. //div[@class="product_name"]

  2. //div[@class="product_title"]

In other words, data is being collected by extracting it from two XPath locations, using the add_xpath() method. This is the data that will be assigned to the name field later.

Afterwards, similar calls are used for price field using a CSS selector with the add_css() method, and finally the last_update field is populated directly with a literal value (today) using a different method: add_value().

Finally, when all data is collected, the ItemLoader.load_item() method is called which actually returns the item populated with the data previously extracted and collected with the add_xpath(), add_css(), and add_value() calls.

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