title: scraping arXiv xml data with Scrapy
body: <p>I'm trying to get information from arXiv's page with <a href="http://scrapy.org/" rel="nofollow">scrapy</a> but cannot select "items" from their <a href="http://export.arxiv.org/rss/hep-th/recent" rel="nofollow">xml page</a>:</p>
  
  <pre><code>from scrapy.spider import BaseSpider
  from scrapy.selector import XmlXPathSelector
  
  class arXivSpider(BaseSpider):
      name = "arxiv"
      allowed_domains = ["arxiv.org"]
      start_urls = ["http://export.arxiv.org/rss/hep-th/recent"]
  
      def parse(self, response):
          xxs = XmlXPathSelector(response)
          papers = xxs.select('//item')
          print papers
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The item object is pretty straightforward, if I could extract it...</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;item rdf:about="http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.5754"&gt;
  &lt;title&gt;blah blah ... blah&lt;/title&gt;
  &lt;link&gt;http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.5754&lt;/link&gt;
  &lt;description rdf:parseType="Literal"&gt;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/description&gt;
  &lt;dc:creator&gt;blah, blah blah&lt;/dc:creator&gt;
  &lt;/item&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The script runs perfectly, it's just <code>papers = []</code> so the spider is not collecting <code>item</code>'s.  It may have to do w/ namespaces... </p>