Scrapy : How to pass list of arguments through command prompt to spider?

Creating a scraper for fantasy team. Looking for a way to pass a list of the players names as arguments, and then for each player_name in player_list run the parsing code. I currently have something like this ``` class statsspider(BaseSpider): name = 'statsspider' def __init__ (self, domain=None, player_list=""): self.allowed_domains = ['sports.yahoo.com'] self.start_urls = [ 'http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/players', ] self.player_list= "%s" % player_list def parse(self, response): example code yield request ``` I'm assuming entering a list of arguments is the same as just one argument through the command line so I enter something like this: ``` scrapy crawl statsspider -a player_list=['xyz','abc'] ``` Problem 2! Solved the first issue by inputting a comma delimited list of arguments like so ``` scrapy crawl statsspider -a player_list="abc def,ghi jkl" ``` I now want to go through each "name" (i.e. 'abc def') to find the first initial of their last name (in this case 'd'). I use the code ``` array = [] for player_name in self.player_list: array.append(player_name) print array ``` And I end up with the result [["'",'a','b','c',... etc]] Why does python not assign player_name to each 'name' (e.g. 'abc def' and 'ghi jkl')? can someone explain this logic to me, and I will probably understand the right way to do it afterwards!