41
submitted 5 months ago by governorkeagan to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

I'm referring to projects like redlib or invidious.

I was thinking about doing something similar for a local second-hand marketplace and got curious. Redlib seems to use token spoofing to get past rate limits and Invidious doesn't even use the official YouTube API.

The only way I thought of, which would be slow, is to scrape the site (like you would with Beautiful Soup).

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] Ephera@lemmy.ml 3 points 5 months ago

You should look into how the webpage is built. If it's a static HTML webpage pre-rendered on the server, then you would have to scrape the HTML to extract the info.

However, many more "modern" webpages use client-side JavaScript to separately request the actual data from the web server through a REST/HTTP API. This kind of API is not possible to fully restrict, unless they want to require all users to log in for viewing the webpage.
And yeah, if it's built like that, then you'd want to make use of that REST API. You do not need to use JavaScript to call it. Using any HTTP client library in any programming language, or even just curl, should work just as much.

To see, if it's built like that, open the "Network" tab in the Developer Tools of your browser and refresh the webpage.
If it just loads a bunch of HTML, CSS and image files, then it's the static webpage kind. If it sends/receives messages with JSON in the body to URLs without a file-type, then it's likely the REST-API-kind.

[-] governorkeagan 1 points 5 months ago

I’ve got a feeling it’s a static site but I’ll confirm to make sure.

this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2024
41 points (100.0% liked)

Asklemmy

44149 readers
1421 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS