Invalid \escape error while trying to download a youtube page

[vis15]

command:
youtube-dl -v http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjbfdFm4786wi6hFXjDKxSA/videos

ouput that I get:

[debug] System config: []
[debug] User config: []
[debug] Command-line args: ['-v', 'http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjbfdFm4786wi6hFXjDKxSA/videos']
[debug] Encodings: locale 'UTF-8', fs 'UTF-8', out 'UTF-8', pref: 'UTF-8'
[debug] youtube-dl version 2014.02.08.2
[debug] Python version 2.7.5+ - Linux-3.11.0-15-generic-x86_64-with-LinuxMint-16-petra
[debug] Proxy map: {}
[youtube:channel] UCjbfdFm4786wi6hFXjDKxSA: Downloading webpage
[youtube:channel] UCjbfdFm4786wi6hFXjDKxSA: Downloading page #1
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/runpy.py", line 162, in _run_module_as_main
"main", fname, loader, pkg_name)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/runpy.py", line 72, in _run_code
exec code in run_globals
File "../youtube-dl/main.py", line 18, in
File "../youtube-dl/youtube_dl/init.py", line 800, in main
File "../youtube-dl/youtube_dl/init.py", line 790, in _real_main
File "../youtube-dl/youtube_dl/YoutubeDL.py", line 982, in download
File "../youtube-dl/youtube_dl/YoutubeDL.py", line 493, in extract_info
File "../youtube-dl/youtube_dl/extractor/common.py", line 158, in extract
File "../youtube-dl/youtube_dl/extractor/youtube.py", line 1596, in _real_extract
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/init.py", line 338, in loads
return _default_decoder.decode(s)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/decoder.py", line 365, in decode
obj, end = self.raw_decode(s, idx=_w(s, 0).end())
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/decoder.py", line 381, in raw_decode
obj, end = self.scan_once(s, idx)
ValueError: Invalid \escape: line 1 column 40052 (char 40051)

[stwl5]

I got exactly the same error today and found out that a beginning uppercase (i.e "\U") instead of lowercase "\u" in a unicode-escape string causes this error, because the json decoder lib of python (my python version is also 2.7.x) only scans for the lowercase variant. A solution was, that I replaced page = json.loads(page) with page = json.loads(page.replace('\\U','\\u')) in file "youtube_dl/extractor/youtube.py" on line 1596. Maybe the same replace should be made on the other information extractors inside youtube.py because I only tried it with "/videos" pages. I also tried the url you posted above, it also worked after the mentioned fix. :)

[phihag]

Thank you for the report, this will be fixed in the next version. Since I'm currently mobile with a very spotty connection, the release may take some time, but should be out within 10 hours.

Simply replacing \U with \u will not work - YouTube intends to describe a character by the codepoint with 8 hexadecimal characters. In contrast, \u only expects 4 hexadecimal characters, so the result after simply replacing will be incorrect and contain superfluous digits.