Using YQL multi-query & XPath to parse HTML, how to escape nested quotes?

Question

The title is more complicated than it has to be, here\'s the problem query.

SELECT * 
FROM query.multi 
WHERE queries=\"
    SELECT * 
        FROM html 
                


        

Answer 1

I've come up with a solution that doesn't really answer my original question but does solve the problem.

The data.html.cssselect table will take a CSS selector & parse it into an XPath, avoiding the nasty escaping issues.

SELECT *
FROM query.multi 
    WHERE queries="
        SELECT * 
            FROM data.html.cssselect 
            WHERE url='http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/http://www.guildwars2.com' 
            AND css='li.listLi div.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'"

Answer 2

You need to escape whatever character is delimiting your XPath query with a double backslash... in other words:

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'"

^{(try this in the YQL console)}