Whether you need to get your data off of a website or simply have a few websites that you need to scrape, Scrapy Hamilton can help.

Scrapy is an easy-to-use Python framework that lets you create a spider, which is a script that scrapes web pages and collects the content it finds on them. The spider can be run on a local machine or on a remote server and can adjust its crawl rate dynamically based on load.

To start writing a Scrapy spider, you’ll need to install Scrapy and Python on your computer. This will enable you to write the spider code that tells Scrapy where to crawl, what types of requests it should make and how it should parse the data it finds.

The next step is to write the XPath queries you’ll need to extract the data from each page you want to scrape. XPath is an incredibly useful tool to use in Scrapy because it lets you define what elements on a page should be extracted, and it can also allow you to include CSS selectors and Regular Expressions in your queries.

After defining the XPath and CSS selectors, you can test your scraping queries using a browser console or through the Scrapy shell mode (see above). If your scraping queries are working correctly, you’ll have a list of items that contain the data you’ve just extracted.

You can then store the information you’ve scraped in a number of different formats, based on file extension, and output it back into a text or JSON format. This is especially useful when you’re scraping large quantities of web pages, or if you need to save your results for future reference.