Okay, so, today I wanted to try and capture some emotes from 7TV. I heard it’s a bit tricky, but I was up for the challenge. I gotta say, it wasn’t as straightforward as I hoped, but hey, that’s part of the fun, right?
First off, I headed over to the 7TV website. You know, just browsing around, checking out what emotes they had. They’ve got a ton of cool ones, it’s actually pretty impressive. I spent a good amount of time just looking through them all, there’s a lot to take in.
Getting Down to Business
Then, the real work began. I needed to figure out how to actually grab these emotes. I started by inspecting the elements, you know, the usual right-click, “Inspect” routine. Looked through the source code for a while. Honestly, I was a bit lost at first, it’s all a jumble of code that’s not exactly easy to read.
After some digging, I noticed that the emotes were being pulled in some kind of data format. Figured out it was probably JSON. So, I started looking for network requests that might be fetching this JSON data. I was refreshing the page, clicking around, just trying to trigger something that would give me a clue.
And then, boom! I spotted a request that looked promising. It had “gql” in the name, which I guessed stood for GraphQL, whatever that is. I opened up the request and sure enough, there was a whole bunch of data in there, including the emotes! I felt like I hit the jackpot, finally something I could work with.
Making it Work
Next, I needed a way to grab this data automatically. I decided to whip up a quick Python script. Nothing fancy, just something to make the request and save the response to a file. I wrote up some code, tested it out, and… it worked! I was getting the JSON data without any issues.
But there was still a problem. The data was just a big blob of text. Not exactly user-friendly. So I added some more code to parse the JSON, extract the emote URLs and names, and save them in a nicer format. I played around with it for a while until I got it just right.
- Inspecting the website’s elements
- Identifying the GraphQL requests
- Writing a Python script to fetch the data
- Parsing the JSON to extract emote info
- Enjoying the collection!
Finally, I had a script that could automatically grab all the emotes from 7TV and save them in a neat and tidy way. It took some effort, but I was pretty stoked with the results. It’s always satisfying to figure something out like this, even if it’s a bit of a struggle at times. Now I’ve got a sweet collection of 7TV emotes, and I learned a thing or two along the way. Not a bad day’s work, I’d say!