Path: csiph.com!news.dns-netz.com!news.freedyn.net!newsreader4.netcologne.de!news.netcologne.de!peer02.ams1!peer.ams1.xlned.com!news.xlned.com!peer01.ams4!peer.am4.highwinds-media.com!news.highwinds-media.com!fx49.ams4.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Spiros Bousbouras Newsgroups: comp.programming Subject: Advice needed on parsing a youtube page Message-ID: X-Organisation: Weyland-Yutani Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Lines: 32 X-Complaints-To: http://netreport.virginmedia.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 27 Feb 2021 14:43:35 UTC Organization: virginmedia.com Date: Sat, 27 Feb 2021 14:43:35 GMT X-Received-Bytes: 2090 Xref: csiph.com comp.programming:12273 I have some code which parses the source of pages for youtube videos and prints some information. My code has been working fine for months but recently it choked on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2itwFJCgFQ .After some investigations I found the part of the page which causes the problem : there is a single appearance of content="\Raffaello D'Andrea\" .My code assumed that the closing double quote is escaped so it did not count it as a closing quote and so parsed incorrectly the rest of the page. So I have 2 questions : 1. Is the above segment valid according to whatever the relevant specification is ? 2. My code only needs to parse the JSON content of pages and extract the information I want. Is there a simple algorithm which strips all the non JSON content of a page ? Or alternatively , is there an algorithm which parses correctly constructs like the above , perhaps taking into account surrounding tags ? I should warn you that the source of the page has some very long lines , the longest being 201416 bytes. So examining the content with some text editors or less will not work smoothly. Filtering the page through something like sed 's/,/,\n/g' makes things a lot more manageable. -- You're on the right path when you understand what Luke Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Darth Vader did not: It's not the force, it's the field! http://www-personal.umich.edu/~williams/emquotes.html David N. Williams