Using YQL multi-query & XPath to parse HTML, how to escape nested quotes?
- by Tivac
The title is more complicated than it has to be, here's the problem query.
SELECT *
FROM query.multi
WHERE queries="
SELECT *
FROM html
WHERE url='http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/http://www.guildwars2.com'
AND xpath='//li[@class=\"listLi\"]/div[@class=\"views\"]/a/span';
SELECT *
FROM xml
WHERE url='http://services.digg.com/1.0/endpoint?method=story.getAll&link=http://www.guildwars2.com';
SELECT *
FROM json
WHERE url='http://api.tweetmeme.com/url_info.json?url=http://www.guildwars2.com';
SELECT *
FROM xml
WHERE url='http://api.facebook.com/restserver.php?method=links.getStats&urls=http://www.guildwars2.com';
SELECT *
FROM json
WHERE url='http://www.reddit.com/button_info.json?url=http://www.guildwars2.com'"
Specifically this line,
xpath='//li[@class=\"listLi\"]/div[@class=\"views\"]/a/span'
It's problematic because of the quoting, I have to nest them three levels deep and I've run out of quote characters to use. I've tried the following variations without success:
//no attribute quoting
xpath='//li[@class=listLi]/div[@class=views]/a/span'
//try to quote attribute w/ backslash & single quote
xpath='//li[@class=\'listLi\']/div[@class=\'views\']/a/span'
//try to quote attribute w/ backslash & double quote
xpath='//li[@class=\"listLi\"]/div[@class=\"views\"]/a/span'
//try to quote attribute with double single quotes, like SQL
xpath='//li[@class=''listLi'']/div[@class=''views'']/a/span'
//try to quote attribute with double double quotes, like SQL
xpath='//li[@class=""listLi""]/div[@class=""views""]/a/span'
//try to quote attribute with quote entities
xpath='//li[@class="listLi"]/div[@class="views"]/a/span'
//try to surround XPath with backslash & double quote
xpath=\"//li[@class='listLi']/div[@class='views']/a/span\"
//try to surround XPath with double double quote
xpath=""//li[@class='listLi']/div[@class='views']/a/span""
All without success.
I don't see much out there about escaping XPath strings but everything I've found seems to be variations on using concat (which won't help because neither ' nor " are available) or html entities. Not using quotes for the attributes doesn't throw an error but fails because it's not the actual XPath string I need.
I don't see anything in the YQL docs about how to handle escaping. I'm aware of how edge-casey this is but was hoping they'd have some sort of escaping guide.
