Writing Scrapy Python Output to JSON file

In this article, we are going to see how to write scrapy output into a JSON file in Python.

Using  scrapy command-line shell

This is the easiest way to save data to JSON is by using the following command:

scrapy crawl <spiderName> -O <fileName>.json

This will generate a file with a provided file name containing all scraped data.

Note that using -O in the command line overwrites any existing file with that name whereas using -o appends the new content to the existing file. However, appending to a JSON file makes the file contents invalid JSON. So use the following command to append data to an existing file.

scrapy crawl <spiderName> -o <fileName>.jl

Note: .jl represents JSON lines format.

Stepwise implementation:

Step 1: Creating the project

Now to start a new project in scrapy use the following command

scrapy startproject tutorial

This will create a directory with the following content:

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Move to the tutorial directory we created using the following command:

cd tutorial

Step 2: Creating a spider (tutorial/spiders/quotes_spider.py)

Spiders are the programs that user defines and scrapy uses to scrape information from website(s). This is the code for our Spider. Create a file named quotes_spider.py under the tutorial/spiders directory in your project:

This is a simple spider to get the quotes, author names, and tags from the website.

Step 5: Running the program

To run the program and save scrawled data to JSON using:

scrapy crawl quotes -O quotes.json

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We can see that a file quotes.json has been created in our project structure, this file contains all the scraped data.

JSON Output:

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These are just a few of many quotes of quotes.json file scraped by our spider.