YQL: html table is no longer supported

Question

I use YQL to get some html-pages for reading information out of it. Since today I get the return message "html table is no longer supported. See https://policies.yahoo.com/us/en/yahoo/terms/product-atos/yql/index.htm for YQL Terms of Use"

Example in the console: https://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/#h=select+*+from+html+where+url%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.de%22

Did Yahoo stop this service? Does anybody know a kind of announcement from Yahoo? I am wondering whether this is simply a bug or whether they really stopped this service...

All documentation is still there (html scraping): https://developer.yahoo.com/yql/guide/yql-select-xpath.html , https://developer.yahoo.com/yql/

A while ago I posted in an YQL forum from Yahoo, now this one does not exist anymore (or at least I do not find it). How can you contact Yahoo to find out whether this service really stopped?

Best regards, hebr3

Answer 1

It looks like Yahoo did indeed end their support of the html library as of 6/8/2017 (according to my error logs). There doesn't appear to be any official announcement of it yet.

Luckily, there is a YQL community library that can be used in place of the official html library with few changes to your codebase. See the htmlstring table in the YQL Console.

Change your YQL query to reference htmltable instead of html and include the community environment in your REST query. For example:

/*/ Old code /*/

var site = "http://www.test.com/foo.html";

var yql = "select * from html where url='" + site + "' AND xpath='//div'";

var resturl = "https://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q="
    + encodeURIComponent(yql) + "&format=json";

 

/*/ New code /*/

var site = "http://www.test.com/foo.html";

var yql = "select * from htmlstring where url='" + site + "' AND xpath='//div'";

var resturl = "https://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q="
    + encodeURIComponent(yql) + "&format=json"
    + "&env=store%3A%2F%2Fdatatables.org%2Falltableswithkeys";