title: Scrapy extracting text from div
body: <p>I am building a simple scraper with Scrapy but am having issues extracting certain parts of the data. The website contains about 20 of the following blocks of code: </p>
  
  <pre><code> &lt;div class="row result"&gt;
      &lt;div class="updateCont date col-md-2 col-sm-2 col-xs-3"&gt;
           &lt;span&gt;    
              &lt;strong&gt;Fri. 10 Feb&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;br /&gt;0:00 AM
           &lt;/span&gt;
      &lt;/div&gt;
      &lt;div class="updateCont eventIcon col-md-1 col-sm-1 col-xs-3"&gt;
          &lt;div class="icon "&gt;
              &lt;i class="fa fa-update"&gt;&lt;/i&gt;
          &lt;/div&gt;
      &lt;/div&gt;
      &lt;div class="updateCont event col-md-9 col-sm-8 col-xs-6"&gt;
          &lt;span&gt; 
                The buyer has been notified of this update. &lt;br /&gt;
                &lt;span class="inner department"&gt;
                    124
                &lt;/span&gt;
          &lt;/span&gt;
      &lt;/div&gt;
  &lt;/div&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I have managed to extract each one of these  with:</p>
  
  <pre><code>sel = Selector(text=response.body)
  updates =  sel.xpath("//div[@class='row result']")
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I now would like to isolate the date and convert it into a datetime object as well as the updateCont event string. <strong>The buy has been notified of this update</strong>.</p>
  
  <p>I tried:</p>
  
  <pre><code>for update in updates:
          date = update.xpath('//span').extract()
          print ( len(date) )
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>which results in 7. I was expecting it to be 3. More worringly, if I print out just date it prints out the same data three times. I was expecting three different lot of data as there are three separate  in the html.</p>
  
  <p>Is </p>
  
  <pre><code>sel = Selector(text=response.body)
  updates =  sel.xpath("//div[@class='row result']")
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>the correct code to isolate the  sections? What would be the best approach to extract the spans?</p>