Economist recipe not working

[trifecta]

I have been running a script to fetch the Economist on a raspberry pi 4 for about a year. Since the end of March this has stopped working. I got the following:

ebook-convert "The Economist.recipe" economist.epub

Conversion options changed from defaults:
test: None
1% Converting input to HTML...
InputFormatPlugin: Recipe Input running
Trying to get latest version of recipe: economist
Using downloaded builtin recipe
1% Fetching feeds...
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/ebook-convert", line 20, in <module>
sys.exit(main())
File "/usr/lib/calibre/calibre/ebooks/conversion/cli.py", line 391, in main
plumber.run()
File "/usr/lib/calibre/calibre/ebooks/conversion/plumber.py", line 1106, in run
accelerators, tdir)
File "/usr/lib/calibre/calibre/customize/conversion.py", line 244, in __call__
log, accelerators)
File "/usr/lib/calibre/calibre/ebooks/conversion/plugins/recipe_input.py", line 136, in convert
ro.download()
File "/usr/lib/calibre/calibre/web/feeds/news.py", line 1021, in download
res = self.build_index()
File "/usr/lib/calibre/calibre/web/feeds/news.py", line 1188, in build_index
feeds = feeds_from_index(self.parse_index(), oldest_article=self.oldest_article,
File "<string>", line 256, in parse_index
File "<string>", line 269, in economist_parse_index
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/__init__.py", line 339, in loads
return _default_decoder.decode(s)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/decoder.py", line 364, in decode
obj, end = self.raw_decode(s, idx=_w(s, 0).end())
TypeError: expected string or buffer

Also when I ran list-recipes there were two recipes of the economist listed. I don't know if this has any relation to the problem. Has anyone else had the same problem? Thanks in advance

[kovidgoyal]

Your version of calibre is too old for that recipe. You will need calibre 5+ most likely or perhaps calibre 4+

[mkgtu]

No problem with Economist, but I've always wondered what the difference is between the two recipes. I think I've tried both, with the same result, and at a quick glance at the recipes they look the same. But I always schedule my download using the second one, with the little red Economist banner.
And BTW, I know the suggestion is to download on Friday morning, but I set it for Thursday, 9am Pacific Time (Los Angeles) and it always works. If I try it 30-60 minutes earlier, it'll still be last week's edition. (I think the new edition is released by Thursday 4pm London time.) The new edition in the Economist apps is usually available Thursday morning Pacific Time as well.

Sent from my SM-G975U using Tapatalk

[kovidgoyal]

The recipes are identical, there are two for historical reasons.