How to access YQL in Python (Django)?

Question

Hey, I need a simple example for the following task:
Send a query to YQL and receive a response
I am accessing public data from python backend of my Django app.

If I just copy/paste an example from YQL, it says "Please provide valid credentials".
I guess, I need OAuth authorization to do it.
So I got an API key and a shared secret.

Now, what should I do with them?
Should I use python oauth library? This one?
http://oauth.googlecode.com/svn/code/python/oauth/

But what is the code? How I pass my secret/API key along with my yql query?

I guess, many Django programmers would love to know this.

Answer 1

Ok, I sort of resolved the problem.
In YQL console example for data/html the following url was presented as an example:

http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/yql?q=select+*+from+html+where+url%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Ffinance.yahoo.com%2Fq%3Fs%3Dyhoo%22+and%0A++++++xpath%3D%27%2F%2Fdiv%5B%40id%3D%22yfi_headlines%22%5D%2Fdiv%5B2%5D%2Ful%2Fli%2Fa%27

It does not work!
But if you insert "/public" after "v1/" than it magically starts working!

http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select+*+from+html+where+url%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Ffinance.yahoo.com%2Fq%3Fs%3Dyhoo%22+and%0A++++++xpath%3D%27%2F%2Fdiv%5B%40id%3D%22yfi_headlines%22%5D%2Fdiv%5B2%5D%2Ful%2Fli%2Fa%27

But the question of how to pass my API key (for v1/yql access) is still open. Any advice?

Answer 2

If you only are accessing public data you can just make a direct rest call from python.

>>> import urllib2
>>> result = urllib2.urlopen("http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select%20title%2Cabstract%20from%20search.web%20where%20query%3D%22paul%20tarjan%22&format=json").read()
>>> print result[:100]
{"query":{"count":"10","created":"2009-11-03T04:47:01Z","lang":"en-US","updated":"2009-11-03T04:47:0

And then you can parse the result with simplejson.

>>> import simplejson
>>> data = simplejson.loads(result)
>>> data['query']['results']['result'][0]['title']
u'<b>Paul</b> <b>Tarjan</b> - Silicon Valley, CA | Facebook'

Answer 3

I've just released python-yql also available on pypi. It can do public, two-legged oauth a.k.a signed requests and facilitate 3-legged outh too.

It's brand new so there may be some bugs whilst I work on improving the test coverage but should hopefully do what you need. See the source for some idea on how to use it.

Installing to try it is as follows:

sudo easy_install yql

Bug/Feature requests can be filed here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/python-yql