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How are private front-ends built without APIs? (lemdro.id)

submitted 3 months ago by governorkeagan@lemdro.id to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

13 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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).

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[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 25 points 3 months ago (9 children)

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@lemdro.id 7 points 3 months ago (8 children)

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@swg-empire.de 9 points 3 months ago (5 children)

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.

[–] brokenlcd@feddit.it 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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@lemmy.ml 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Why not at least use Python?

[–] brokenlcd@feddit.it 1 points 3 months ago

I've always been searching for the time to learn python, but between uni and work i wake up at 5 and go back home at 10; + they where not going to pay me for this fix

Tldr; couldn't be fucked to study a whole other language in my nonexistent free time for a fix that they wouldn't pay me for anyways

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