def create_crawler(self, crawler_or_spidercls):
        """
        Return a :class:`~scrapy.crawler.Crawler` object.

        * If ``crawler_or_spidercls`` is a Crawler, it is returned as-is.
        * If ``crawler_or_spidercls`` is a Spider subclass, a new Crawler
          is constructed for it.
        * If ``crawler_or_spidercls`` is a string, this function finds
          a spider with this name in a Scrapy project (using spider loader),
          then creates a Crawler instance for it.
        """
        if isinstance(crawler_or_spidercls, Spider):
            raise ValueError(
                'The crawler_or_spidercls argument cannot be a spider object, '
                'it must be a spider class (or a Crawler object)')
        if isinstance(crawler_or_spidercls, Crawler):
            return crawler_or_spidercls
        return self._create_crawler(crawler_or_spidercls)

        Return a :class:`~scrapy.crawler.Crawler` object.

        * If ``crawler_or_spidercls`` is a Crawler, it is returned as-is.
        * If ``crawler_or_spidercls`` is a Spider subclass, a new Crawler
          is constructed for it.
        * If ``crawler_or_spidercls`` is a string, this function finds
          a spider with this name in a Scrapy project (using spider loader),
          then creates a Crawler instance for it.
        
stackoverflow/venv/lib/python3.6/site-packages/scrapy/crawler.py