Economist recipe cover page is blank

[hongho71]

The Economist recipe cover page shows up blank. Thanks.

[kovidgoyal]

Works for me

[yoyoisbest]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Works for me

Hi I have the same issue.

The cover under US is about Israel.



Failed to download cover
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "calibre/web/feeds/news.py", line 1442, in download_cover
File "calibre/web/feeds/news.py", line 1436, in _download_cover
File "calibre/utils/img.py", line 302, in save_cover_data_to
File "calibre/utils/img.py", line 205, in image_to_data
ValueError: Failed to export image as JPEG with error: Image is empty

[kovidgoyal]

That error indicates the server is sending an empty cover image, probably it will be fixed next week automatically, if not let me know.

[nickredding]

The same issue arises with Javascript-based retrieval, although the response seen is "forbidden." Of course the result is also blank, so I suspect Python is not reporting the forbidden status.

The weird thing is, if the url is constructed rater than extracted from the JSON structure, the image is retrieved successfully. I modified the economist recipe as follows.

            self.cover_url = (
                safe_dict(data, 'props', 'pageProps', 'content', 'cover', 'url')
                .replace(
                    'economist.com/',
                    'economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=960,quality=80,format=auto/',
                )
                .replace('SQ_', '')
            )
            self.log('Got embedded cover:', self.cover_url)
            #from datetime import datetime
            #issueDate = datetime.fromisoformat(safe_dict(data, 'props', 'pageProps', 'content', 'issueDate').replace('Z', '+00:00')).strftime("%Y%m%d")
            #self.cover_url = 'https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=960,quality=80,format=auto/content-assets/images/' + issueDate + '_DE_US.jpg'
            #self.log('Got constructed cover:', self.cover_url)

As expected, the cover image does not load. However, if I uncomment the code to get the constructed url, it works, even though the urls appear to be the same. Here is the log output:

Got embedded cover: https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=960,quality=80,format=auto/content-assets/images/29250920_DE_US.jpg
Got constructed cover: https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=960,quality=80,format=auto/content-assets/images/20250920_DE_US.jpg

I get the same results using Javascript. The string lengths are the same (so there are no hidden characters corrupting the embedded url).

Very strange indeed. If anyone has a theory as to what's happening, let's hear it.

[kovidgoyal]

Your two URLs are not the same, the filename parts are different.

[nickredding]

Yes I see that now. So the embedded url is wrong which is why it doesn't work. I suppose that might get fixed at some point, but until then no economist cover pages will show until the code is modified to remove this fault.

[kovidgoyal]

As I said, if the bug remains on the Economist servers when next weeks issue is released, I will modify the recipe.