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In this issue:

• Scrapy 2.5.0 is out
• Recipe scraping app (with source code)
• Web scraping in Elixir
• Easy table scraping with R

Scrapy 2.5.0 is out

The first new Scrapy release of the year is here!

Highlights:
- Official Python 3.9 support
- Experimental HTTP/2 support
- New get_retry_request() function to retry requests from spider callbacks
- New headers_received signal that allows stopping downloads early
- New Response.protocol attribute

Release notes here.

Recipe scraping app

@mango_mero - as part of the #100DaysOfCode challenge -  created an awesome django demo app which scrapes recipe information real-time, using beautifulsoup. Source code is available on Github.

Web scraping in Elixir

If you are using Elixir for web dev, and considering a web scraping project, you might want to check out this framework: Crawly, a high-level web crawling & scraping framework for Elixir. Check out the documentation and the quickstart guide.

Easy table scraping with R

Extracting data from HTML tables can be messy. For one-off jobs though, there's an easy alternative. If you're using R Studio, there's an addin which makes it easy to scrape tables: datapasta. You literally just copy the table from the page, paste it into the tool and you get the data in structured form. Here's a tutorial video.