title: Use Scrapy to crawl local XML file - Start URL local file address
body: <p>I want to crawl a local xml file that I have located in my Downloads folder with scrapy, use xpath to extract the relevant information.</p>
  
  <p>Using the scrapy intro as a <a href="http://doc.scrapy.org/en/latest/intro/overview.html#intro-overview" rel="nofollow">guide</a> </p>
  
  <pre><code>2016-01-24 12:38:53 [scrapy] DEBUG: Retrying &lt;GET file://home/sayth/Downloads/20160123RAND0.xml&gt; (failed 2 times): [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/sayth/Downloads/20160123RAND0.xml'
  2016-01-24 12:38:53 [scrapy] DEBUG: Gave up retrying &lt;GET file://home/sayth/Downloads/20160123RAND0.xml&gt; (failed 3 times): [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/sayth/Downloads/20160123RAND0.xml'
  2016-01-24 12:38:53 [scrapy] ERROR: Error downloading &lt;GET file://home/sayth/Downloads/20160123RAND0.xml&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I have tried several version of the below however i am not able to get the start url to accept my file.</p>
  
  <pre><code># -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
  import scrapy
  
  
  class MyxmlSpider(scrapy.Spider):
      name = "myxml"
      allowed_domains = ["file://home/sayth/Downloads"]
      start_urls = (
          'http://www.file://home/sayth/Downloads/20160123RAND0.xml',
      )
  
      def parse(self, response):
          for file in response.xpath('//meeting'):
              full_url = response.urljoin(href.extract())
              yield scrapy.Request(full_url, callback=self.parse_question)
  
      def parse_xml(self, response):
          yield {
              'name': response.xpath('//meeting/race').extract()
          }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Just to confirm I do have the file in that location</p>
  
  <pre><code>sayth@sayth-HP-EliteBook-2560p : ~/Downloads
  [0] % ls -a
  .                                                              Building a Responsive Website with Bootstrap [Video].zip
  ..                                                             codemirror.zip
  1.1 Situation Of Long Term Gain.xls                            Complete-Python-Bootcamp-master.zip
  2008 Racedata.xls                                              Cox Plate 2005.xls
  20160123RAND0.xml  
  </code></pre>