Input

Overview

The basic idea of initializing is discussed in the second and third tutorials and serves one of two purposes:

1. Prepare Objects: If you are saving the scraped information to a database, CSV, or XML file then you will likely want to initialize these objects before you start. Also, if you will be iterating over pages, you might need to start your iterator before the scrape begins.
2. Debug Script: In this form the script is meant only to allow you to run a scrape with variables that will later be received from an external script but are required for it to run.

As you can guess, you might have both of these needs in a single script of in two different scripts. Regardless, here we present different methods for initializations scripts including such variables as where you get the values of your variables.