Scrapy Concepts

Before diving into how Scrapy works, it is essential to understand some key concepts:

• Project: A Scrapy project is a structured collection of files and folders that include configuration files, custom functionality, and one or more Spider classes responsible for reading and collecting information from web pages.
• Spiders: These are classes that define how to navigate one or more web pages and collect the desired data.
• Items: The data collected during scraping is stored in objects or collections of objects. For instance, when scraping a car classifieds website, each vehicle’s details—such as price, model, and year—can be stored in an item object and later exported as JSON or XML.
• Pipeline: A pipeline is a special class that allows for additional processing of each item returned during scraping. Pipelines can be used for data validation or storing scraped items in a database.