JSON::ParserError unexpected token with playlist

[benphelps]

An error when trying to get information for a playlist:

dl = YoutubeDL::Video.new "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqz-KE-bpKQ&list=PLiYYIXHYUrMI6mMJADvK2FeoSgK3HuZ49"
dl.information
# JSON::ParserError: 784: unexpected token at '{"upload_date": "20150810" ...

I'm using the latest version of the gem, here are the contents of my Gemfile:

source 'https://rubygems.org'

# Rails Stuff
gem 'rails', '4.2.6'
gem 'sqlite3'
gem 'sass-rails', '~> 5.0'
gem 'uglifier', '>= 1.3.0'
gem 'coffee-rails', '~> 4.1.0'
gem 'jquery-rails'
gem 'jbuilder', '~> 2.0'

gem 'sidekiq'
gem 'sidekiq-status'
gem 'youtube-dl.rb'
gem 'awesome_print'

group :development do
  gem 'web-console', '~> 2.0'
  gem 'spring'
  gem 'pry-rails'
end

Ruby version ruby 2.3.1p112 (2016-04-26 revision 54768) [x86_64-linux]

[sapslaj]

Thanks for reporting this, Ben. I'm looking into it and I'll keep you updated.

[benphelps]

So trying to dig further into this I've found that youtube-dl returns multiple json strings for each video in a playlist, separated by a new line, this of course breaks the JSON parsing.

[benphelps]

Maybe this will help, this is a bit of code I used to pull out the individual media URLs from the JSON response from youtube-dl.

def extract_playlist_sources(json)
  sources = json.split("\n").collect { |json|
    JSON.parse(json)
  }.collect { |source|
    source["webpage_url"]
  }
end

This wouldn't be an easy fix I don't think, it'd require adding support for playlists.

[sapslaj]

Thanks for the help, that really narrowed down the problem. Right now I'm thinking about either forcing #information to return an Array or figuring out if the URL is a playlist and then returning an Array. It also isn't really cool that the JSON from youtube-dl isn't valid JSON, so I'll probably make an issue upstream for that.

I've made a branch and a WIP PR to track development on this.

EDIT: This is definitely going to bring breaking API changes so I'm going to add this to the 0.4.0 milestone.