How do I handle infinite scrolling with Scrapy?

You can handle infinite scrolling in Scrapy using the selenium package. Infinite scrolling works by continuously loading content as the user scrolls down the page. This is usually done using JavaScript, which Scrapy doesn't support out of the box.

However, you can use the selenium package in combination with the scrapy package to handle infinite scrolling. Here is a basic setup:

First, install the selenium package for python with pip:

pip install selenium

Next, you will need to install a driver to interface with the chosen browser. For example, Firefox requires geckodriver, which needs to be installed before running the script. You can download it from the geckodriver release page.

Then, you need to set the path to the driver as an environment variable. On Unix systems, you can do this by running:

export PATH=$PATH:/path-to-extracted-file/.

Here is a basic example of using selenium with scrapy to handle infinite scrolling:

import scrapy
from selenium import webdriver
from scrapy.selector import Selector
from time import sleep

class InfScrollSpider(scrapy.Spider):
    name = "inf_scroll"

    def start_requests(self):
        self.driver = webdriver.Firefox()
        self.driver.get('http://website.com')

        while True:
            self.driver.execute_script("window.scrollTo(0, document.body.scrollHeight);")
            sleep(1)  # Allow time for page to load
            sel = Selector(text=self.driver.page_source)
            posts = sel.xpath('//div[@class="post"]').extract()
            for post in posts:
                yield {"post": post}

            next = self.driver.find_element_by_xpath('//a[@class="next"]')
            try:
                next.click()
            except Exception:
                self.logger.info("No more pages to load.")
                self.driver.quit()
                break

In this example, we create a Scrapy spider that uses Selenium to scroll down the page, load new content, and then scrape the loaded content. The while loop keeps scrolling down the page until it can't find a "next" button to click.

Note: This is just a basic example. The XPath expressions used to select posts and the "next" button should be replaced with expressions that match the structure of the website you're scraping. Also, infinite scrolling can be implemented in many different ways, and this example might not work for all websites.