title: Python: How to append a string to a scrapy list item?
body: <p>I'm scraping a collection of urls, but they all lack the base of the url, so I want to append the "start_url" as a base to each scraped url.</p>
  
  <p>Spider class:</p>
  
  <pre><code>class MySpider(BaseSpider):
      name = "teslanews"
      allowed_domains = ["teslamotors.com"]
      start_urls = ["http://www.teslamotors.com/blog"]
  
      def parse(self, response):
          hxs = HtmlXPathSelector(response)
          updates = hxs.xpath('//div[@class="blog-wrapper no-image"]')
  
          items = []
          for article in updates:
              item = TeslanewsItem()
              item["date"] =  article.xpath('./div/span/span/text()').extract()
              item["title"] = article.xpath('./h2/a/text()').extract()
              item["url"] = article.xpath('./h2/a/@href').extract()
              items.append(item)
          return items
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I can't do a simple <code>item["url"] = article.xpath('./h2/a/@href').extract() + base</code> with <code>base = "http://www.teslamotors.com"</code></p>
  
  <p>because this adds the base to the end and it does it letter by letter due to being in a for-loop and each letter is separated by commas.  </p>
  
  <p>I'm relatively new to Scrapy so I don't exactly know which way to go with this.</p>