code: def _publish_date(self, item):
          
  
          url = item['url']
          html = deepcopy(item['spider_response'].body)
          publish_date = None
  
          try:
              if html is None:
                  request = urllib2.Request(url)
                  # Using a browser user agent, decreases the change of sites blocking this request - just a suggestion
                  # request.add_header('User-Agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko)
                  # Chrome/41.0.2228.0 Safari/537.36')
                  html = urllib2.build_opener().open(request).read()
  
              html = BeautifulSoup(html, "lxml")
  
              publish_date = self._extract_from_json(html)
              if publish_date is None:
                  publish_date = self._extract_from_meta(html)
              if publish_date is None:
                  publish_date = self._extract_from_html_tag(html)
              if publish_date is None:
                  publish_date = self._extract_from_url(url)
          except Exception as e:
              # print(e.message, e.args)
              pass
  
          return publish_date
docs: Returns the publish_date of the extracted article.