How do I scrape PDFs with Scrapy?

Web scraping is a method to extract data from websites. While Scrapy is a powerful framework for web scraping, it is designed to handle HTML content and not built to directly handle PDF files. However, you can still use Scrapy to download the PDF files, and then use an additional library, such as PyPDF2 or PDFMiner for Python, to extract the data from the downloaded PDFs.

Here's a step by step guide:

1. Use Scrapy to Download PDF Files

First, you need to configure Scrapy to handle file downloads. This can be done in your settings.py file. You'll need to set the FILES_STORE variable, which is where the downloaded files will be stored, and add 'scrapy.pipelines.files.FilesPipeline' to your ITEM_PIPELINES setting.

# settings.py

ITEM_PIPELINES = {'scrapy.pipelines.files.FilesPipeline': 1}
FILES_STORE = '/path/to/your/folder'

Then, in your Scrapy spider, you need to yield a Request for each PDF URL, and pass the response to a method that will yield a new item with the file URLs:

# spider.py

import scrapy

class PdfSpider(scrapy.Spider):
    name = 'pdf_spider'
    start_urls = ['http://example.com']

    def parse(self, response):
        for href in response.css('a::attr(href)').extract():
            if 'pdf' in href:
                yield scrapy.Request(response.urljoin(href), callback=self.parse_pdf)

    def parse_pdf(self, response):
        yield {'file_urls': [response.url]}

2. Use PyPDF2 or PDFMiner to Extract Data from PDFs

After downloading the PDFs, you can use PyPDF2 or PDFMiner to extract data from them. Below is an example using PyPDF2:

# extract_data.py

import PyPDF2

def extract_data_from_pdf(file_path):
    with open(file_path, 'rb') as file:
        reader = PyPDF2.PdfFileReader(file)
        content = reader.getPage(0).extractText()  # Get text content from the first page
        return content

And here is an example using PDFMiner:

# extract_data.py

from pdfminer.high_level import extract_text

def extract_data_from_pdf(file_path):
    content = extract_text(file_path)  # Get text content from all pages
    return content

Remember that PDF scraping can be quite complex due to the variability of the structure and formatting of PDF files. The above examples are simplified and might not work for all PDFs. You might need to use more advanced features of PyPDF2 or PDFMiner, or other libraries like PDFQuery or Slate, depending on the specifics of your PDFs.