Need help understanding the output of the program - python-2.7

Question

I was working with ma project XYZ
and I got stuck in extracting text in from the source
gifts
I want to extrack the href as content
I tried this
from scrapy.spider import BaseSpider
from scrapy.selector import HtmlXPathSelector
from XYZ.items import XYZ
class MySpider(BaseSpider):
name = "main"
allowed_domains = ["XYZ"]
start_urls = ["XYZ"]
def parse(self, response):
hxs = HtmlXPathSelector(response)
titles = hxs.select("//a[#data-tracking-id='mdd-heading']")
items = []
for titles in titles:
item = XYZ()
item ["title"] = titles.select("text()").extract()
item ["link"] = titles.select("#href").extract()
items.append(item)
print "www.xyz.com"+str(item["link"])
return items
and the output was
www.xyz.com[u'/gifts']
I was expecting output as
www.xyz.com/gifts
What i did wrong.... ?

Answer 1

According to the documentation for Selector's extract():
extract()
Serialize and return the matched nodes as a list of unicode
strings. Percent encoded content is unquoted.
So, extract() returns a list and you need the first item from it. Use item['link'][0].
Also, there are other problems in the code:
for titles in titles loop doesn't make sense, you need a separate loop variable
HtmlXPathSelector is deprecated, use Selector
use urljoin() to join the parts of a url
Here's the complete code with fixes and other improvements:
from urlparse import urljoin
from scrapy.spider import BaseSpider
from scrapy.selector import Selector
from XYZ.items import XYZ
class MySpider(BaseSpider):
name = "main"
allowed_domains = ["XYZ"]
start_urls = ["XYZ"]
def parse(self, response):
titles = response.xpath("//a[#data-tracking-id='mdd-heading']")
for title in titles:
item = XYZ()
item ["title"] = title.xpath("text()").extract()[0]
item ["link"] = title.xpath("#href").extract()[0]
print urljoin("www.xyz.com", item["link"])
yield item