Scrapy - Non-ascii-character declared, but no encoding declared
Question: I'm attempting to scrape some basic data off this site as an exercise to learn
more about scrapy, and as proof of concept for a university project:
<http://steamdb.info/sales/>

When I was using the scrapy shell I was able to get the information I wanted
using the following XPath:

    
    
    sel.xpath(‘//tbody/tr[1]/td[2]/a/text()’).extract()
    

which should return the title of the game of the first row of the table, in
the structure:

    
    
    <tbody>
         <tr>
              <td></td>
              <td><a>stuff I want here</a></td>
    ...
    

And it does, in the shell.

However, when I attempt to put this into a spider (steam.py):

    
    
    1 from scrapy.spider import BaseSpider
    2 from scrapy.selector import HtmlXPathSelector
    3 from steam_crawler.items import SteamItem
    4 from scrapy.selector import Selector
    5 
    6 class SteamSpider(BaseSpider):
    7     name = "steam"
    8     allowed_domains = ["http://steamdb.info/"]
    9     start_urls = ['http://steamdb.info/sales/?displayOnly=all&category=0&cc=uk']
    10     def parse(self, response):
    11         sel = Selector(response)
    12         sites = sel.xpath("//tbody")
    13         items = []
    14         count = 1
    15         for site in sites:
    16             item = SteamItem()
    17             item ['title'] = sel.xpath('//tr['+ str(count) +']/td[2]/a/text()').extract().encode('utf-8')
    18             item ['price'] = sel.xpath('//tr['+ str(count) +']/td[@class=“price-final”]/text()').extract().encode('utf-8')
    19             items.append(item)
    20             count = count + 1
    21         return items
    

I get the following error:

    
    
        ricks-mbp:steam_crawler someuser$ scrapy crawl steam -o items.csv -t csv
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "/usr/local/bin/scrapy", line 5, in <module>
        pkg_resources.run_script('Scrapy==0.20.0', 'scrapy')
      File "build/bdist.macosx-10.9-intel/egg/pkg_resources.py", line 492, in run_script
    
      File "build/bdist.macosx-10.9-intel/egg/pkg_resources.py", line 1350, in run_script
        for name in eagers:
      File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/Scrapy-0.20.0-py2.7.egg/EGG-INFO/scripts/scrapy", line 4, in <module>
        execute()
      File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/Scrapy-0.20.0-py2.7.egg/scrapy/cmdline.py", line 143, in execute
        _run_print_help(parser, _run_command, cmd, args, opts)
      File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/Scrapy-0.20.0-py2.7.egg/scrapy/cmdline.py", line 89, in _run_print_help
        func(*a, **kw)
      File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/Scrapy-0.20.0-py2.7.egg/scrapy/cmdline.py", line 150, in _run_command
        cmd.run(args, opts)
      File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/Scrapy-0.20.0-py2.7.egg/scrapy/commands/crawl.py", line 47, in run
        crawler = self.crawler_process.create_crawler()
      File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/Scrapy-0.20.0-py2.7.egg/scrapy/crawler.py", line 87, in create_crawler
        self.crawlers[name] = Crawler(self.settings)
      File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/Scrapy-0.20.0-py2.7.egg/scrapy/crawler.py", line 25, in __init__
        self.spiders = spman_cls.from_crawler(self)
      File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/Scrapy-0.20.0-py2.7.egg/scrapy/spidermanager.py", line 35, in from_crawler
        sm = cls.from_settings(crawler.settings)
      File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/Scrapy-0.20.0-py2.7.egg/scrapy/spidermanager.py", line 31, in from_settings
        return cls(settings.getlist('SPIDER_MODULES'))
      File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/Scrapy-0.20.0-py2.7.egg/scrapy/spidermanager.py", line 22, in __init__
        for module in walk_modules(name):
      File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/Scrapy-0.20.0-py2.7.egg/scrapy/utils/misc.py", line 68, in walk_modules
        submod = import_module(fullpath)
      File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/importlib/__init__.py", line 37, in import_module
        __import__(name)
      File "/xxx/scrape/steam/steam_crawler/spiders/steam.py", line 18
    SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xe2' in file /xxx/scrape/steam/steam_crawler/spiders/steam.py on line 18, but no encoding declared; see http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0263.html for details
    

I have a feeling that all I need to do is somehow tell scrapy that the
characters will follow utf-8 not ascii - as there are £'s etc. But from what I
can gather, its supposed to gather this information from the head of the page
its scraping which in the case of this site is:

    
    
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    

Which leaves me baffled! Any insight/reading that isn't the scrapy docs
themselves I would be interested in too!


Answer: seems like you are using `“` instead of double quotes `"`

btw, a better practice to loop on all table rows would be something like:

    
    
    for tr in sel.xpath("//tr"):
        item = SteamItem()
        item ['title'] = tr.xpath('td[2]/a/text()').extract()
        item ['price'] = tr.xpath('td[@class="price-final"]/text()').extract()
        yield item
    

