Using screenr, I’ve just recorded a new sub-five minute screencast detailing a web scraping example using YQL, jQuery and JSONP.
In the video, I quickly introduce YQL‘s web scraping capability by returning a the contents of an HTML element on the JustGiving website. The data is obtained using jQuery’s getJSON method via JSONP for a cross-domain request. It’s short, but simple, and aims to give a brief example of what’s possible using YQL and jQuery.
May 12, 2010 at 12:41 pm
Thanks! It helped.
July 15, 2010 at 1:11 am
Excellent! Been following YQL for ages and never really “got it” till your screenr presy.
Thanks for doing this!
July 15, 2010 at 3:57 pm
It’s interesting, thanks
July 16, 2010 at 9:43 am
Wow. That was the easiest to follow YQL tutorial I’ve seen to date. Thanks for posting the link over at NetTuts!
November 13, 2010 at 7:12 pm
Thank you for the video!
Any idea why:
select * from html where url=”http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1665999″ and xpath=’/html/body/center/table/tbody/tr[3]/td/table/tbody/tr/td[2]/a’
does return null?
November 14, 2010 at 9:13 am
Hi tommy,
best thing is to grab what you need in Firebug and select the XPath (as I did in the XPath). Although you can do it by expanding the html, it’ll be a lot easier with Firebug’s help.
Hope that helps.
May 18, 2011 at 5:21 am
Saw the link from nettuts comments to this video, have to say YQL is extremely powerful, thanks for taking the time to make this video
September 17, 2011 at 12:27 am
nice short tutorial, thanks! i’m wondering if I could use YQL to query for binary files and return them to a client?
September 21, 2011 at 6:49 pm
Hi Mustafa – my simple example returned a text element… when you say binary files, do you mean a JPEG for example? If you wanted to grab a JPEG file, you could look for a particular
imgtag, and grab thesrcattribute value… is that what you mean?