Scrapy pipeline extracting in the wrong csv format

Question

My Hacker News spider outputs all the results on one line, instead of one each line, as it can be seen here.

All on the same line

Here is my code.

import scrapy
import string
import urlparse
from scrapy.selector import Selector
from scrapy.selector import HtmlXPathSelector
from scrapy.contrib.linkextractors import LinkExtractor


class HnItem(scrapy.Item):
    title = scrapy.Field()
    link = scrapy.Field()
    score = scrapy.Field()  

class HnSpider(scrapy.Spider):
    name = 'hackernews'
    allowed_domains = ["news.ycombinator.com"]
    start_urls = ["https://news.ycombinator.com/"]

    def parse(self, response):
        sel = response

        selector_list = response.xpath('.//table[@class="itemlist"]')


        for sel in selector_list:
            item = HnItem()


            item['title'] = sel.xpath('.//td[@class="title"]/text()').extract()
            item['link'] = sel.xpath('.//tr[@class="athing"]/td[3]/a/@href').extract()
            item['score'] = sel.xpath('.//td[@class="subtext"]/span/text()').extract()

            yield item

and my settings.py file

BOT_NAME = 'hnews'

SPIDER_MODULES = ['hnews.spiders']
NEWSPIDER_MODULE = 'hnews.spiders'

USER_AGENT = 'hnews (+http://www.yourdomain.com)'

FEED_URI = '/used/scrapy/hnews/%(name)s/%(time)s.csv'
FEED_FORMAT = 'csv'

I've tried to implement this among many other solutions but no luck so far. I'm still very new at this, so bear with me if possible.

Answer 1

It is happening because your item pipeline is getting all the lists at once. For expample: The item['title'] is getting a list of all the titles at once which is then transferred to the item pipeline and then written to the csv file directly.

The solution is to iterate over the list and yield it to the item pipeline one at a time. Here's a modified code:

import scrapy
from scrapy.selector import Selector


class HnItem(scrapy.Item):
    title = scrapy.Field()
    link = scrapy.Field()
    score = scrapy.Field()  

class HnSpider(scrapy.Spider):
    name = 'hackernews'
    allowed_domains = ["news.ycombinator.com"]
    start_urls = ["https://news.ycombinator.com/"]

    def parse(self, response):
        sel = Selector(response)
        item = HnItem()
        title_list = sel.xpath('.//td[@class="title"]/a/text()').extract()[:-2]
        link_list= sel.xpath('.//tr[@class="athing"]/td[3]/a/@href').extract()
        score_list = sel.xpath('.//td[@class="subtext"]/span/text()').extract()
        for x in range(0,len(title_list)):
            item['title'] = title_list[x]
            item['link'] = link_list[x]
            item['score'] = score_list[x]
            yield item