instaloader: Error when downloading Hashtags: `Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)`

Describe the bug Hashtags not found when using session

To Reproduce Steps to reproduce the behavior:

$ instaloader -l rayamberg "#lisaandrewsartist"
Loaded session from /home/rsa/.config/instaloader/session-rayamberg.
Logged in as rayamberg.
JSON Query to explore/tags/lisaandrewsartist/: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0) [retrying; skip with ^C]
JSON Query to explore/tags/lisaandrewsartist/: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0) [retrying; skip with ^C]
Get hashtag #lisaandrewsartist: JSON Query to explore/tags/lisaandrewsartist/: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)
Saved session to /home/rsa/.config/instaloader/session-rayamberg.

Errors or warnings occurred:
Get hashtag #lisaandrewsartist: JSON Query to explore/tags/lisaandrewsartist/: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)

Expected behavior I expected to be able to download the posts for the given hashtag. Note that it works when I supply the password directly to instaloader:

$ instaloader -l rayamberg -p ****** "#lisaandrewsartist"
Session file does not exist yet - Logging in.
Logged in as rayamberg.
#lisaandrewsartist/2022-04-20_06-34-03_UTC_profile_pic.jpg 
Retrieving pictures with hashtag #lisaandrewsartist...
[  1] #lisaandrewsartist/2022-04-20_06-42-39_UTC.jpg [Meet the Artist Lisa Andrews …] json 
[  2] #lisaandrewsartist/2022-04-20_06-42-33_UTC.jpg [Meet the Artist Lisa Andrews …] json 
[  3] #lisaandrewsartist/2022-04-20_06-37-47_UTC.jpg [We love this painting of Swee…] json 
...
Saved session to /home/rsa/.config/instaloader/session-rayamberg.
$

Error messages and tracebacks See traceback above

Instaloader version 4.9.1

Additional context It’s happening for all hashtags I am testing. They all return posts when I don’t use a session and return the JSON Query error when I do use a session. I can download other things when I use a session, e.g. instaloader -l rayamberg someprofile works. I’m writing a python script and getting the same unexpected behavior when I use load_session_from_file("rayamberg") and expected behavior when I use login("rayamberg", "mypass"). I used the Firefox script on the troubleshooting page to try to resolve the issue, and although it appeared to successfully import the session, the issue persists.

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 2 years ago
Comments: 22 (1 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

Thanks for the bug report. I was able to reproduce the error. It actually appears both when using an existing session and when using a fresh login.

Thammus on Jul 14, 2022

Same, im getting the html in my resp and it crashes. Any clues or any details on fixes?

kuahhx on Aug 2, 2022

I’m having the same issue, with a code that used to function well until about a month ago. I investigated a bit, I hope this helps: It seems it comes from the get_json method of the InstaLoaderContext class, so I compared the behaviour of this method when calling Profile.from_username vs. when calling Hashtag.from_name. The result I see differs on line 325 in instaloadercontext.py, that is: resp = sess.get('https://{0}/{1}'.format(host, path), params=params, allow_redirects=False)

In the first case when calling Profile.from_username in my main code, the line mentioned above yields a requests.models.Response object whose content is well formatted, so that calling resp_json = resp.json() on line 370 of the same file works fine. When calling Hashtag.from_name, the same request result returns a Response object whose content is the html code of the page, which cannot be processed correctly and crashes when calling resp_json = resp.json() on line 370, causing the error Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0).

So, I would suspect Instagram changed the format of the result returned when calling the API for hashtags, do you have any clue on that?

YMALOT on Jul 28, 2022