Ehsanul Haque

Grab Yahoo class is in “coma”

Grab Yahoo class was one of my works that has been used by many people around the world. Since I released this class I did  not have a single month without comments or questions or suggestion about this class. Some people have copied the class, released it under their name (simply taking out my comments and added their own) to increase traffic to their site probably. But more importantly this class was appreciated by many. This was one of my finest contribution to the open source world.

How did I come up with this idea?

Well, I cannot remember which user group but in one of the groups I participate in had a discussion over if PHP can pull data off from places like Yahoo and use it for some purpose. Users on the group said this can be done (easily) with Java, but cannot be done with PHP. So I started researching over it. I found the cURL extension for PHP which seemed the good candidate to do the job. So I started working on it. After days of coding I finally wrote a script that will allow someone to login to their Yahoo account and fetch data from their address book. Initially I simply had a script but then I converted it to a Class allowing people to grab their address book, messenger list, number of new emails and calendar data.

What is happening now?

As per the title of this post this class is in “coma”. The reason is the update to Yahoo address book export mechanism. They have placed a CAPTCHA validation page in the export feature and, therefore, my Grab Yahoo class cannot go any further to grab the content it needs. Same thing happened with the LinkMeIn class which stopped working after LinkedIn added the CAPTCHA validation.

Why is this class in “coma”?

I have looked at the Yahoo address book export feature and found the CAPTCHA validation which will not allow the class to work. But I’ve not done my complete research on it yet, to make sure there is no other way to make this class functional. So, for the time being, this class is in “coma”. If I fail to revive this class I will probably officially pronounce it “dead”.

Can you help?

Yes, of course, you can. I hardly have time, these days, to sit with these side projects. If anyone from the community has time to research and help me revive this class it will be appreciated. Your name will go into the credit section of the class, well that is all I can offer!

Patch for Grab Yahoo class released

Last week suddenly my Grab Yahoo class stopped working for Address Book section. After Mr Mandy Singh reported the bug on phpclasses.org discussion board I started digging to resolve the issue.

When requesting the address book CSV from Yahoo a value for the key “crumb” is sent in the query string. Earlier Yahoo never checked for the validity of the variable but they have changed the way it is used. Now they check if the value for “crumb” is valid or not. As my script was using a predefined value and it has expired, Yahoo server could not validate. Yahoo was showing an error stating “Invalid or missing crumb”.

I modified my class so that it first loads the page from where request for the CSV is made. From the source of the page, it locates the latest value for crumb assigned by Yahoo and uses that value to send request for the address book CSV file. It is now working as expected. If you find any bug please report it on phpclasses.org discussion board.

Please download the latest version of Grab Yahoo class (v. 1.2.1) here.

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Thank you.