The Naked Technologist

While I’ve been working with the Yahoo! Query Language, there are several queries that I have put together for different tasks which I wished to share.  These queries showcase some of the screen scraping and external file aggregation abilities of the platform.  All of these queries may be tested on the YQL console to see the output results. Below are a few of these queries:

Digg story headlines – Captures all page headlines

• select * from html where url=”http://www.digg.com” and xpath=’//div[@class="news-body"]/h3/a’

Flickr get photos in a set – Get number of photos

• select * from html where url=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/ydn/sets/72157605430417580/” and xpath=’//div[@class="Results"]/p’

Flickr – Get photos on page 1 (60 per page)

• select * from html where url=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/ydn/sets/72157605430417580/” and xpath=’//div[@id="setThumbs"]/div’

Flickr – Get photos on page 2

• select * from html where url=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/ydn/sets/72157605430417580/?page=2″ and xpath=’//div[@id="setThumbs"]/div’

Twitter – Get recent user tweets

• select * from html where url=”http://twitter.com/jcleblanc” and xpath=’//span[@class="entry-content"]‘

Timezone from lat/lon – Get timezone data based on lat/lon

• select * from xml where url=’http://ws.geonames.org/timezone?lat=33.917&lng=-118.1234′

Flickr Connection Friend’s Photos – Capture photos for locations of user’s connections

• select * from flickr.photos.search where has_geo=”true” and text in (select location from social.profile where guid in (select guid from social.connections where owner_guid=me))

Maps by Placemaker URL – Returns maps for all places found at a URL

• select * from maps.map where (latitude, longitude) IN (SELECT match.place.centroid.latitude, match.place.centroid.longitude FROM geo.placemaker WHERE documentURL = “http://www.cnn.com/” AND documentType=”text/html” AND appid=”")

- Jonathan LeBlanc

In: YQL | tags: Programming, Tutorial, YQL. | #