What are Scrapy pipelines and how do they work?

What are Scrapy pipelines and how do they work?

Scrapy pipelines are components in the Scrapy framework that process the items extracted by spiders. They allow you to clean, validate, and store the data.

Can you give me an example of a simple pipeline?

Sure! A simple pipeline might look like this:

class MyPipeline:
    def process_item(self, item, spider):
        item['title'] = item['title'].strip()  # Clean the title
        return item

How do I enable a pipeline in my Scrapy project?

You can enable a pipeline by adding it to the ITEM_PIPELINES setting in your settings.py file. For example:

ITEM_PIPELINES = {
    'myproject.pipelines.MyPipeline': 300,
}

What is the purpose of the priority number in ITEM_PIPELINES?

The priority number determines the order in which pipelines are executed. Lower numbers run first, allowing you to control the processing sequence.