August 2024 no longer returning data from HowLongToBeat.com

[ScrappyCocco]

Discussed in #24

^{Originally posted by yipidee August 2, 2024}
I've been using howlongtobeatpy in a script with no problems for some time now, but suddenly it has started returning "None" for any search term. HowLongToBeat is up and running, has the API been broken by some change?

[ScrappyCocco]

Hello and thank you for the Issue @yipidee

The library is (at least temporarily) fixed on howlongtobeatpy 1.0.6

It looks like the search url changed from
"api/search"
to
"api/search" + "/4b4cbe570602c88660f7df8ea0cb6b6e"

This code looks like a hash of some kind but I investigated just a little and it doesn't looks like it's user-generated
I tried to open the website from a different pc in a completely different network (different IP) and it was still that one
So maybe it's a random-access token and they're going to change it every X-time? In that case we need to figure out where is it received on the client and to gather that too for the api to work correctly

This need to be checked so I'm going to leave the issue on hold for a while

[yipidee]

Issue fixed in 1.0.6

[cpresse]

Had the same issue today and 1.0.6 fixed it right away. Looks good! Thank you.

[tlt21]

Looks like it got updated again, the search guid is now "ac8bb4dd1834c9056f6f6a0294fdb1b4"

[ScrappyCocco]

Ok so it changes every now and then and it can't be hardcoded like that, it must be read somewhere from the website like the browser does
I am not available to update it now, I'll have a look at it at the end of the month, I am sorry

[ScrappyCocco]

Also that /search/key looks like to be generated or loaded inside a js like https://howlongtobeat.com/_next/static/chunks/pages/_app-dbc6a57c887f99a6.js that doesn't seems stable url to read it, so a solution is not immediate either

[ScrappyCocco]

I'm doing some tests in this branch https://github.com/ScrappyCocco/HowLongToBeat-PythonAPI/tree/FetchApiKey (PR #25) reading the api key from the website and it looks like it works fine, could publish a new version soon

[ScrappyCocco]

All tests are green, version 1.0.7 fetch the api key from the website so it could be a bit slower but should work fine for a longer time (hopefully)

I used a new method to publish the package on pypi so if there are problems please let me know

https://pypi.org/project/howlongtobeatpy/1.0.7/