Scrapy returning scraped values into an array

Question

Scrapy seems to be pulling the data out correctly, but is formatting the output in my JSON object as if it were an array:

[{"price": ["$34"], "link": ["/product/product..."], "name": ["productname"]},
{"price": ["$37"], "link": ["/product/product"]...

My spider class looks like this:

def parse(self, response):
    sel = Selector(response)
    items = sel.select('//div/ul[@class="product"]')
    skateboards = []
    for item in items:
        skateboard = SkateboardItem()
        skateboard['name'] = item.xpath('li[@class="desc"]//text()').extract()
        skateboard['price'] = item.xpath('li[@class="price"]"]//text()[1]').extract()
        skateboard['link'] = item.xpath('li[@class="image"]').extract()
        skateboards.append(skateboard)
    return skateboards

How would I go about ensuring that Scrapy is only outputting a single value for each key, rather than the array it's currently producing?

Answer 1

.extract()  

always returns a list you can use

''.join(item.xpath('li[@class="desc"]//text()').extract())

to get a string

Answer 2

Use:
1 .extract_first() or
2 .extract()[0]

to get data in string format.

PS: using Scrapy 1.2