use in shell 1. scrapy shell url css selector: response.css('small.author') <small class = "author"> william<> --> html will look something like this response.css('small.author').extract() to get the actual html data Now to remove the html selector: response.css('small.author::text').extract() To get the result as string and not as list and to select the first element response.css('small.author::text')[0].extract() or response.css('small.author::text').extract_first() for doing scrapy shell website to load a new website while we are in shell we can use fetch(url) To create a new request scrapy.Request(url)