Scraping dynamic content using python-Scrapy

I faced that problem and solved easily by following these steps

pip install splash
pip install scrapy-splash
pip install scrapyjs

download and install docker-toolbox

open docker-quickterminal and enter

$ docker run -p 8050:8050 scrapinghub/splash

To set the SPLASH_URL check the default ip configured in the docker machine by entering
$ docker-machine ip default (My IP was 192.168.99.100)

SPLASH_URL = 'http://192.168.99.100:8050'
DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES = {
    'scrapyjs.SplashMiddleware': 725,
}

DUPEFILTER_CLASS = 'scrapyjs.SplashAwareDupeFilter'

That's it!

From what I understand, the size availability is determined dynamically in javascript being executed in the browser. Scrapy is not a browser and cannot execute javascript.

If you are okay with switching to selenium browser automation tool, here is a sample code:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.support.select import Select
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC

browser = webdriver.Firefox()  # can be webdriver.PhantomJS()
browser.get('http://www.koovs.com/only-onlall-stripe-ls-shirt-59554.html?from=category-651&skuid=236376')

# wait for the select element to become visible
select_element = WebDriverWait(browser, 10).until(EC.visibility_of_element_located((By.CSS_SELECTOR, "div.select-size select.sizeOptions")))

select = Select(select_element)
for option in select.options[1:]:
    print option.text

browser.quit()

It prints:

S / 34 -- Not Available
L / 40 -- Not Available
L / 42

Note that in place of Firefox you can use other webdrivers like Chrome or Safari. There is also an option to use a headless PhantomJS browser.

You can also combine Scrapy with Selenium if needed, see:

• selenium with scrapy for dynamic page
• scrapy-webdriver
• seleniumcrawler

You can also solve it with ScrapyJS (no need for selenium and a real browser):

This library provides Scrapy+JavaScript integration using Splash.

Follow the installation instructions for Splash and ScrapyJS, start the splash docker container:

$ docker run -p 8050:8050 scrapinghub/splash

Put the following settings into settings.py:

SPLASH_URL = 'http://192.168.59.103:8050' 

DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES = {
    'scrapyjs.SplashMiddleware': 725,
}

DUPEFILTER_CLASS = 'scrapyjs.SplashAwareDupeFilter'

And here is your sample spider that is able to see the size availability information:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import scrapy


class ExampleSpider(scrapy.Spider):
    name = "example"
    allowed_domains = ["koovs.com"]
    start_urls = (
        'http://www.koovs.com/only-onlall-stripe-ls-shirt-59554.html?from=category-651&skuid=236376',
    )

    def start_requests(self):
        for url in self.start_urls:
            yield scrapy.Request(url, self.parse, meta={
                'splash': {
                    'endpoint': 'render.html',
                    'args': {'wait': 0.5}
                }
            })

    def parse(self, response):
        for option in response.css("div.select-size select.sizeOptions option")[1:]:
            print option.xpath("text()").extract()

Here is what is printed on the console:

[u'S / 34 -- Not Available']
[u'L / 40 -- Not Available']
[u'L / 42']