Merge pull request #3171 from mkelley/mpc-exception-format

Format MPC ephemeris error response as text (i.e., strip HTML tags).

CHANGES.rst

@@ -89,6 +89,10 @@ mpc
 - Remove ``comettype`` parameter from ``MPC.get_observations`` without
   deprecation: it was undocumented, ignored, and had no effect.  [#3089]
 
+- When ``MPC.get_ephemeris`` raises an ``InvalidQueryError`` message, instead of
+  returning the original HTML formatted text, strip the HTML tags and return a
+  plain text message.  [#3171]
+
 nvas
 ^^^^
 

astroquery/mpc/core.py

@@ -1047,7 +1047,7 @@ def _parse_result(self, result, **kwargs):
             content = result.content.decode()
             table_start = content.find('<pre>')
             if table_start == -1:
-                raise InvalidQueryError(content)
+                raise InvalidQueryError(BeautifulSoup(content, "html.parser").get_text())
             table_end = content.find('</pre>')
             text_table = content[table_start + 5:table_end]
             SKY = 'raty=a' in result.request.body