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How are private front-ends built without APIs?

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).

Barx ,

Invidious does have APIs. People host invidious servers and the clients connect to them, similar to piped. I don’t know anything about Redlib but it might work the same!

governorkeagan OP ,

I’m referring to the fact that they don’t use or have major rate limits on the APIs that they use for either Reddit or YouTube, respectively.

kitnaht ,

Also the legal benefit of scraping the site without the YouTube API is that you haven’t had to accept their terms of service.

There’s an Android app called GrayJay that got a C&D from Google, and they told Google to kindly fuck off, because they hadn’t used any of Google’s APIs. Google had no leg to stand on.

governorkeagan OP ,

Interesting, I didn’t know that. Thanks for the info!

bjoern_tantau ,
@bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de avatar

It’s not very slow to scrape a website. Works quite well. Your app would appear like any other browser to the site. The trouble with that is that it breaks easily when they change something on their site. Doesn’t even have to be a malicious change.

governorkeagan OP ,

It’s not very slow to scrape a website. Works quite well.

That’s good to know, I’ll look into that some more. I was thinking that it might be slow if I’m having to scrape each page, every time a user changes categories (or something similar).

The trouble with that is that it breaks easily when they change something on their site.

I completely forgot about that :(

bjoern_tantau ,
@bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de avatar

That’s good to know, I’ll look into that some more. I was thinking that it might be slow if I’m having to scrape each page, every time a user changes categories (or something similar).

Well, it’s as slow as the website you’re scraping. Could actually be faster if you don’t have to execute a lot of bullshit JavaScript. And for the rest clever caching should help.

In terms of technology you’re looking for XSLT, Xpath, CSS selectors and whatever parsers are available for your language of choice. Don’t ever attempt to use regex for scraping.

governorkeagan OP ,

You’ve given me a great jumping off point, thank you!

meekah ,
@meekah@lemmy.world avatar

Don’t ever attempt to use regex for scraping.

seconded

brokenlcd ,

Don’t ever attempt to use regex for scraping.

Proceeds to implement a scraper in bash with grep and awk because it’s the only way i know how to

SubArcticTundra ,
@SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml avatar

Why not at least use Python?

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