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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-14T18:51:06+00:00

I am trying to use YQL to extract a portion of HTML from a

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I am trying to use YQL to extract a portion of HTML from a series of web pages. The pages themselves have slightly different structure (so a Yahoo Pipes “Fetch Page” with its “Cut content” feature does not work well) but the fragment I am interested in always has the same class attribute.

If I have an HTML page like this:

<html>
  <body>
    <div class="foo">
      <p>Wolf</p>
      <ul>
        <li>Dog</li>
        <li>Cat</li>
      </ul>
    </div>
  </body>
</html>

and use a YQL expression like this:

SELECT * FROM html 
WHERE url="http://example.com/containing-the-fragment-above" 
AND xpath="//div[@class='foo']"

what I get back are the (apparently unordered?) DOM elements, where what I want is the HTML content itself. I’ve tried SELECT content as well, but that only selects textual content. I want HTML. Is this possible?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You could write a little Open Data Table to send out a normal YQL html table query and stringify the result. Something like the following:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<table xmlns="http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/schema/table.xsd">
  <meta>
    <sampleQuery>select * from {table} where url="http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=yhoo" and xpath='//div[@id="yfi_headlines"]/div[2]/ul/li/a'</sampleQuery>
    <description>Retrieve HTML document fragments</description>
    <author>Peter Cowburn</author>
  </meta>
  <bindings>
    <select itemPath="result.html" produces="JSON">
      <inputs>
        <key id="url" type="xs:string" paramType="variable" required="true"/>
        <key id="xpath" type="xs:string" paramType="variable" required="true"/>
      </inputs>
      <execute><![CDATA[
var results = y.query("select * from html where url=@url and xpath=@xpath", {url:url, xpath:xpath}).results.*;
var html_strings = [];
for each (var item in results) html_strings.push(item.toXMLString());
response.object = {html: html_strings};
]]></execute>
    </select>
  </bindings>
</table>

    You could then query against that custom table with a YQL query like:

    use "http://url.to/your/datatable.xml" as html.tostring;
select * from html.tostring where 
  url="http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=yhoo" 
  and xpath='//div[@id="yfi_headlines"]/div[2]/ul/li'

    Edit: Just realised this is a pretty old question that was bumped; at least an answer is here, eventually, for anyone stumbling on the question. 🙂

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