but quite a few handy improvements nonetheless.
Scrapy now supports anonymous FTP sessions with customizable user and
password via the new :setting:`FTP_USER` and :setting:`FTP_PASSWORD` settings.
And if you're using Twisted version 17.1.0 or above, FTP is now available
with Python 3.
There's a new :meth:`response.follow <scrapy.http.TextResponse.follow>` method
for creating requests; **it is now a recommended way to create Requests
in Scrapy spiders**. This method makes it easier to write correct
spiders; ``response.follow`` has several advantages over creating
``scrapy.Request`` objects directly:
* it handles relative URLs;
* it works properly with non-ascii URLs on non-UTF8 pages;
* in addition to absolute and relative URLs it supports Selectors;
for ``<a>`` elements it can also extract their href values.
Bug fixes
- Make ``SpiderLoader`` raise ``ImportError`` again by default for missing
dependencies and wrong :setting:`SPIDER_MODULES`.
These exceptions were silenced as warnings since 1.3.0.
A new setting is introduced to toggle between warning or exception if needed ;
see :setting:`SPIDER_LOADER_WARN_ONLY` for details.
Scrapy is a fast high-level web crawling and web scraping framework, used to
crawl websites and extract structured data from their pages. It can be used for
a wide range of purposes, from data mining to monitoring and automated testing.
