Scrapy find all links with different(similar) class - scrapy

Question

I'm trying to scrap links with certain class "post-item post-item-xxxxx". But since the class is different in each, how can I capture all of them?
<li class="post-item post-item-18887"><a
href="http://example.com/archives/18887.html" title="Post1"</a></li>
<li class="post-item post-item-18883"><a href="http://example.com/archives/18883.html" title="Post2"</a></li>
my code:
scrap all the cafe links from example.com
class DengaSpider(scrapy.Spider):
name = 'cafes'
allowed_domains = ['example.com']
start_urls = [
'http://example.com/archives/8136.html',
]
rules = [
Rule(
LinkExtractor(
allow=('^http://example\.com/archives/\d+.html$'),
unique=True
),
follow=True,
callback="parse_items"
)
]
def parse(self, response):
cafelink = response.css('post.item').xpath('//a/#href').extract()
if cafelink is not None:
print(cafelink)
the .css part is not working, how can I fix it?

Answer 1

Here's a sample run for the above html in scrapy shell:
>>> from scrapy.http import HtmlResponse
>>> response = HtmlResponse(url="Test HTML String", body='<li class="post-item post-item-18887"><a href="http://example.com/archives/18883.html" title="Post2"</li>', encoding='utf-8')
>>>
>>> cafelink = response.css('li.post-item a::attr(href)').extract_first()
>>> cafelink
'http://example.com/archives/18887.html'
>>>
>>> cafelink = response.css('li.post-item a::attr(href)').extract()
>>> cafelink
['http://example.com/archives/18887.html', 'http://example.com/archives/18883.html']

Answer 2

Xpath has the contains() method for this, so you might try this:
cafelink = response.xpath("//*[contains(#class, 'post-item-')]//a/#href").extract()
Also be careful when using // in xpath. It makes xpath starts the search in the document root, no matter where it currently is.

Answer 3

If all the items you want also have the "post-item" class then why do you need to capture them by their other class? In case you still need to do that, try the "starts with" CSS selector:
response.css('li[class^="post-item post-item-"]')
Documentation here.