Changed default representation of items to pretty-printed dicts. This improves

default logging by making log more readable in the default case, for both Scraped and Dropped lines.

Projects can still customize how items are represented by overriding the item's __str__ method, as usual.

docs/intro/tutorial.rst

@@ -405,8 +405,14 @@ scraped so far, the final code for our Spider would be like this::
 
 Now doing a crawl on the dmoz.org domain yields ``DmozItem``'s::
 
-   [dmoz] DEBUG: Scraped DmozItem(desc=[u' - By David Mertz; Addison Wesley. Book in progress, full text, ASCII format. Asks for feedback. [author website, Gnosis Software, Inc.]\n'], link=[u'http://gnosis.cx/TPiP/'], title=[u'Text Processing in Python']) in <http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Python/Books/>
-   [dmoz] DEBUG: Scraped DmozItem(desc=[u' - By Sean McGrath; Prentice Hall PTR, 2000, ISBN 0130211192, has CD-ROM. Methods to build XML applications fast, Python tutorial, DOM and SAX, new Pyxie open source XML processing library. [Prentice Hall PTR]\n'], link=[u'http://www.informit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0130211192'], title=[u'XML Processing with Python']) in <http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Python/Books/>
+   [dmoz] DEBUG: Scraped from <200 http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Python/Books/>
+        {'desc': [u' - By David Mertz; Addison Wesley. Book in progress, full text, ASCII format. Asks for feedback. [author website, Gnosis Software, Inc.\n],
+         'link': [u'http://gnosis.cx/TPiP/'],
+         'title': [u'Text Processing in Python']}
+   [dmoz] DEBUG: Scraped from <200 http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Python/Books/>
+        {'desc': [u' - By Sean McGrath; Prentice Hall PTR, 2000, ISBN 0130211192, has CD-ROM. Methods to build XML applications fast, Python tutorial, DOM and SAX, new Pyxie open source XML processing library. [Prentice Hall PTR]\n'],
+         'link': [u'http://www.informit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0130211192'],
+         'title': [u'XML Processing with Python']}
 
 Storing the scraped data
 ========================

scrapy/item.py

@@ -4,6 +4,7 @@ Scrapy Item
 See documentation in docs/topics/item.rst
 """
 
+from pprint import pformat
 from UserDict import DictMixin
 
 from scrapy.utils.trackref import object_ref
@@ -72,11 +73,7 @@ class DictItem(DictMixin, BaseItem):
         return self._values.keys()
 
     def __repr__(self):
-        """Generate a representation of this item that can be used to
-        reconstruct the item by evaluating it
-        """
-        values = ', '.join('%s=%r' % field for field in self.iteritems())
-        return "%s(%s)" % (self.__class__.__name__, values)
+        return pformat(dict(self))
 
 
 class Item(DictItem):

scrapy/logformatter.py

@@ -1,3 +1,4 @@
+import os
 
 class LogFormatter(object):
     """Class for generating log messages for different actions. All methods
@@ -12,7 +13,7 @@ class LogFormatter(object):
             request, referer, flags)
 
     def scraped(self, item, response, spider):
-        return "Scraped %s in <%s>" % (item, response.url)
+        return "Scraped from %s" % response + os.linesep + str(item)
 
     def dropped(self, item, exception, response, spider):
-        return "Dropped %s - %s" % (item, unicode(exception))
+        return "Dropped: %s" % unicode(exception) + os.linesep + str(item)

scrapy/tests/test_command_shell.py

@@ -12,7 +12,7 @@ class ShellTest(ProcessTest, SiteTest, unittest.TestCase):
     @defer.inlineCallbacks
     def test_empty(self):
         _, out, _ = yield self.execute(['-c', 'item'])
-        assert 'Item' in out
+        assert '{}' in out
 
     @defer.inlineCallbacks
     def test_response_body(self):

scrapy/tests/test_item.py

@@ -50,7 +50,7 @@ class ItemTest(unittest.TestCase):
         i['number'] = 123
         itemrepr = repr(i)
         self.assertEqual(itemrepr,
-                         "TestItem(name=u'John Doe', number=123)")
+                         "{'name': u'John Doe', 'number': 123}")
 
         i2 = eval(itemrepr)
         self.assertEqual(i2['name'], 'John Doe')

scrapy/tests/test_logformatter.py

@@ -26,8 +26,8 @@ class LoggingContribTest(unittest.TestCase):
         item = {}
         exception = Exception(u"\u2018")
         response = Response("http://www.example.com")
-        self.assertEqual(self.formatter.dropped(item, exception, response, self.spider),
-            u"Dropped {} - \u2018")
+        lines = self.formatter.dropped(item, exception, response, self.spider).splitlines()
+        self.assertEqual(lines, [u"Dropped: \u2018", '{}'])
 
 if __name__ == "__main__":
     unittest.main()