title: Advice extracting //td text and numbers
body: <p>I have been working through the tutorial adapting it to a project I want to achieve. I seem to have something going wrong that i just can't find the error to.</p>
  
  <p>When using 'scrapy shell' I can get the response I expect. So for this site <a href="http://live.nrlstats.com/nrl/ladder.html" rel="nofollow">Nrl Ladder</a></p>
  
  <pre><code>In [1]: hxs.select('//td').extract()
  Out[1]: 
  [u'&lt;td&gt;\r\n&lt;div id="ls-nav"&gt;\r\n&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.nrlstats.com/"&gt;&lt;span&gt;Home&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;\r\n&lt;li class="ls-nav-on"&gt;&lt;a href="/nrl"&gt;&lt;span&gt;NRL&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;\r\n&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="/nyc"&gt;&lt;span&gt;NYC&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;\r\n&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="/rep"&gt;&lt;span&gt;Rep Matches&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;\r\n\r\n&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/div&gt;\r\n&lt;/td&gt;',
   u'&lt;td style="text-align:left" colspan="5"&gt;Round 4&lt;/td&gt;',
   u'&lt;td colspan="5"&gt;Updated: 26/3/2012&lt;/td&gt;',
   u'&lt;td style="text-align:left"&gt;1. Melbourne&lt;/td&gt;',
   u'&lt;td&gt;4&lt;/td&gt;',
   u'&lt;td&gt;4&lt;/td&gt;',
   u'&lt;td&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;',
   u'&lt;td&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;',
   u'&lt;td&gt;0&lt;/td&gt;',
   u'&lt;td&gt;122&lt;/td&gt;',
   u'&lt;td&gt;39&lt;/td&gt;',
   u'&lt;td&gt;83&lt;/td&gt;',
   u'&lt;td&gt;8&lt;/td&gt;',
   u'&lt;td style="text-align:left"&gt;2. Canterbury-Bankstown&lt;/td&gt;',
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And on it goes.</p>
  
  <p>I am really struggling to understand how to alter the tutorial project to change it to a different data type. </p>
  
  <p>Is there anyway to bring up a help or documentation list to see what types I should use in items when using 'td' or any other item. Like i say it works easy in the shell but I cannot transform it to the files. Specifically both the team names and the points are 'td' but the team name is text.</p>
  
  <p>here is what I have done.</p>
  
  <pre><code>from scrapy.spider import BaseSpider
  from scrapy.selector import HtmlXPathSelector
  
  from nrl.items import NrlItem
  
  class nrl(BaseSpider):
      name = "nrl"
      allowed_domains = ["http://live.nrlstats.com/"]
      start_urls = [
          "http://live.nrlstats.com/nrl/ladder.html",
          ]
  
      def parse(self, response):
          hxs = HtmlXPathSelector(response)
          sites = hxs.select('//td')
          items = []
          for site in sites:
             item = nrlItem()
             item['team'] = site.select('/text()').extract()
             item['points'] = site.select('/').extract()
             items.append(item)
          return items
  </code></pre>