JSONDecodeError when hitting endpoints

[popo9192]

When I hit some of the endpoints it works for the first few calls, but then i get the following error every time i try:

json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)

Has anyone else been getting this?

[popo9192]

This is the line that is leaving errors:
score = boxscorescoringv2.BoxScoreScoringV2(game_id=game)

[swar]

What happens when you call the link in a web browser?

See valid link here: https://github.com/swar/nba_api/blob/master/docs/nba_api/stats/endpoints/boxscorescoringv2.md

I have a feeling you're getting limited after a few calls.

[cclauss]

The full error log , not just one line, would help us to find the line that is breaking.

[popo9192]

Here is the full error:

summary = boxscoresummaryv2.BoxScoreSummaryV2(game_id=game)
File "//anaconda/envs/nba_wizard/lib/python3.6/site-packages/nba_api/stats/endpoints/boxscoresummaryv2.py", line
17, in init
data_sets = self.nba_response.get_data_sets()
File "//anaconda/envs/nba_wizard/lib/python3.6/site-packages/nba_api/stats/library/http.py", line 73, in get_dat
a_sets raw_dict = self.get_dict()
File "//anaconda/envs/nba_wizard/lib/python3.6/site-packages/nba_api/library/http.py", line 38, in get_dict
return json.loads(self._response)
File "//anaconda/envs/nba_wizard/lib/python3.6/json/init.py", line 354, in loads
return _default_decoder.decode(s)
File "//anaconda/envs/nba_wizard/lib/python3.6/json/decoder.py", line 339, in decode
obj, end = self.raw_decode(s, idx=_w(s, 0).end())
File "//anaconda/envs/nba_wizard/lib/python3.6/json/decoder.py", line 357, in raw_decode
raise JSONDecodeError("Expecting value", s, err.value) from None
json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)

[swar]

Did you run into the issue with the suggestion that I mentioned above?

From your error log, what's happening is that nothing is getting returned from the API requests. So when you try to load the raw JSON into a dictionary, it fails because nothing is not valid JSON. I believe I am correct in assuming that you're getting banned / limited after a few requests.

For error handling, I suggest using valid_json() to determine if the response returned is in valid JSON. If it is, then you can use get_dict() as you please. However, I suggest using time.sleep() to pause your script so that you're not sending so many requests at a time.

Let me know if you have any questions.

[xzs]

As an FYI, it seems like NBA stats API is limiting users to 10 consecutive calls. I've been running a forked version of https://github.com/dblackrun/scrape_nba for the last 2 seasons to scrape the API to a local db with no issues, until today.

It seems like they've upped the restrictions this time around (in addition to adding https) even if you masked the USER-AGENT in the header

Here is a screenshot from logging my requests (ignore the SQLalchemy errors):

EDIT: as an interesting note. using time.sleep(5) to set a delay does seem to bypass this issue. I was able to scrape all data for both of today's games with this bypass.

[mrr358]

I had the same error with this API and found the game_id I was using from another api call (playergamelog) was 8 chars long. I spotted on the API docs that the pattern required was ^\d{10}$ so I popped 2 leading '00' and it worked ok.