Question

I try to scrape some website with YQL (for a Appcelerator Titanium mobile app).

The data I need is within an A tag, but it’s formatted:

<a href="...">
     <strong>Drugs</strong> and Culture</font>
</a>

so, when I run query like:

select * from html where  url='...'  and xpath="//table[2]/tr/td[2]//a"

I get:

 {"strong": "Drugs", "content": "\n and Culture"}

I need YQL to ignore those “strong” tags and respond with text value:

{content: "Drugs and Culture"}

Do You have any idea how to do it?

Answer 1

I don’t know YQL, but a pure XPath expression that produces the wanted result is:

normalize-space(//table[2]/tr/td[2]//a)