From 9210bf463a8818595f7ca42486a787d4f1941d55 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Peter Stone Date: Wed, 21 Oct 2026 19:07:17 +0000 Subject: Fix stray promo headers, site-URL subscribing, and YouTube playback Three reported bugs. **"West Hawaii today articles get a bunch of stray Trending headers."** The publisher's widget platform injects promo blocks between the real paragraphs, inside the article's own container, so every structural signal tells Readability they belong. What survives is a heading labelling nothing, because the links under it are filled in by a script that never runs in the reader. Confirmed on 9 of the 12 articles in that feed, two each. Blocks marked `data-mrf-recirculation` are now removed -- the attribute says what the block is for in the widget platform's own words, which is a better signal than the word "Trending", since an article may legitimately discuss what is trending. Nothing longer than a label and a few headlines is ever removed. Also applied to already-cached articles, in place rather than by discarding them: the article was fine, only the litter has to go. **"Can't subscribe to heathercoxrichardson.substack.com."** Adding a feed handed whatever URL it was given straight to the XML parser, so a site's home page -- the only URL a reader can actually see and copy -- failed on the root element. That page advertises its feed the way sites have since 2002, in a in the head. It is now read, resolved against the page, and fetched. Only what the page declares: guessing /feed and /rss would add a burst of 404s to every failed add and eventually subscribe somebody to the wrong thing. **"YouTube play is misconfigured."** It was, and YouTube said so: the player dialog loaded the embed as its own top-level document, which answers with "Video player configuration error -- Error 153". An embed has to be embedded. It now sits in an iframe on a minimal host page. Measured in the app's own WebView: top-level, no requests for the video stream and the error on screen; framed, the stream loads and there is no error. **"Long click on YouTube placeholder should open the URL directly."** It does now. Worth recording why this is not simply the link's href: for an image inside a link, WebView's hit test reports the image's URL, so a long-press on the thumbnail arrives as the i.ytimg.com JPEG. The video id is resolved out of that. Verified on a device for all four: the Substack site URL adds "Letters from an American" and fetches 20 articles; a West Hawaii Today article extracts with no Trending headers and its body intact; the video plays; and a long-press reaches the YouTube app. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_018AwnALZL6bD4VBtATDVv3B --- .../feedreader/readability/EvalOutcomeTest.kt | 18 ++++ .../readability/RecirculationWidgetsTest.kt | 117 +++++++++++++++++++++ 2 files changed, 135 insertions(+) create mode 100644 app/src/test/java/org/terst/feedreader/readability/RecirculationWidgetsTest.kt (limited to 'app/src/test/java/org/terst/feedreader/readability') diff --git a/app/src/test/java/org/terst/feedreader/readability/EvalOutcomeTest.kt b/app/src/test/java/org/terst/feedreader/readability/EvalOutcomeTest.kt index 8995e22..3e2b28f 100644 --- a/app/src/test/java/org/terst/feedreader/readability/EvalOutcomeTest.kt +++ b/app/src/test/java/org/terst/feedreader/readability/EvalOutcomeTest.kt @@ -1,6 +1,7 @@ package org.terst.feedreader.readability import org.junit.Assert.assertEquals +import org.junit.Assert.assertFalse import org.junit.Assert.assertTrue import org.junit.Test @@ -86,4 +87,21 @@ class EvalOutcomeTest { assertTrue(f.userMessage().lowercase().contains("cookie") || f.userMessage().lowercase().contains("consent")) assertTrue(f.userMessage() != ExtractionFailure.NoContent.userMessage()) } + + /** + * A fresh extraction is cleaned before it is accepted, so the widgets never reach the + * screen and never reach `articles.extractedContent` either. + */ + @Test + fun `a successful extraction has its recirculation widgets stripped`() { + val body = "

" + "Real article sentence. ".repeat(40) + "

" + val widget = "

Trending

" + val article = ExtractedArticle(title = "T", content = body + widget + body) + + val decision = decideEvalOutcome(article, rawResult = "{}", attempt = 1, maxAttempts = 6) + + val content = ((decision as EvalDecision.Done).result as ExtractionResult.Success).article.content!! + assertFalse("the stray header reached the caller: $content", content.contains("Trending")) + assertTrue(content.contains("Real article sentence.")) + } } diff --git a/app/src/test/java/org/terst/feedreader/readability/RecirculationWidgetsTest.kt b/app/src/test/java/org/terst/feedreader/readability/RecirculationWidgetsTest.kt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0926b80 --- /dev/null +++ b/app/src/test/java/org/terst/feedreader/readability/RecirculationWidgetsTest.kt @@ -0,0 +1,117 @@ +package org.terst.feedreader.readability + +import org.junit.Assert.assertEquals +import org.junit.Assert.assertFalse +import org.junit.Assert.assertTrue +import org.junit.Test + +/** + * Promo blocks a publisher's widget platform injects into the middle of the article body. + * + * Reported live on West Hawaii Today: "articles get a bunch of stray 'Trending' headers". + * Confirmed on 9 of the 12 articles in its feed, two per article. + */ +class RecirculationWidgetsTest { + + /** The exact markup that survives extraction, from a West Hawaii Today article. */ + private val realWidget = + """

Trending

""" + + @Test + fun `strips a recirculation widget from the middle of an article`() { + val html = "

Real sentence one.

$realWidget

Real sentence two.

" + + val cleaned = RecirculationWidgets.strip(html)!! + + assertFalse("the stray header is still there: $cleaned", cleaned.contains("Trending")) + assertTrue(cleaned.contains("Real sentence one.")) + assertTrue(cleaned.contains("Real sentence two.")) + } + + @Test + fun `strips every widget, not just the first`() { + val html = "

One.

$realWidget

Two.

$realWidget

Three.

" + + val cleaned = RecirculationWidgets.strip(html)!! + + assertEquals(0, Regex("Trending").findAll(cleaned).count()) + assertTrue(cleaned.contains("Three.")) + } + + @Test + fun `leaves an article with no widgets exactly as it was`() { + val html = "

Nothing to do here.

A real heading

More.

" + + assertEquals(html, RecirculationWidgets.strip(html)) + } + + @Test + fun `never removes a block long enough to be real writing`() { + val paragraph = "Beaches across the island lost coral cover. ".repeat(20) + val html = """

$paragraph

""" + + assertTrue( + "a block this long is article text whatever attribute it carries", + RecirculationWidgets.strip(html)!!.contains("Beaches across the island") + ) + } + + @Test + fun `handles an unquoted or single-quoted attribute`() { + val html = "

a

Trending

b

" + + assertFalse(RecirculationWidgets.strip(html)!!.contains("Trending")) + } + + @Test + fun `survives a nested div inside the widget`() { + val html = "

a

Trending

b

" + + val cleaned = RecirculationWidgets.strip(html)!! + assertFalse(cleaned.contains("Trending")) + assertTrue(cleaned.contains("

a

")) + assertTrue(cleaned.contains("

b

")) + } + + @Test + fun `an unclosed widget div does not eat the rest of the article`() { + val html = "

Before.

Trending

After.

" + + assertTrue( + "a malformed widget must not take the article with it", + RecirculationWidgets.strip(html)!!.contains("Before.") + ) + } + + @Test + fun `null and blank are left alone`() { + assertEquals(null, RecirculationWidgets.strip(null)) + assertEquals("", RecirculationWidgets.strip("")) + } + + /** + * The whole extracted article, captured from the live page on 2026-10-21 by running the + * vendored Readability.js over it exactly as the app does. + * + * The unit cases above use the widget markup on its own, which proves the matcher but not + * that it meets reality in one piece. This is the article Peter would have been reading. + */ + @Test + fun `the real extracted article loses both widgets and keeps its text`() { + val extracted = checkNotNull( + javaClass.getResourceAsStream("/west-hawaii-today-extracted.html") + ).bufferedReader().use { it.readText() } + assertEquals("fixture should carry the reported bug", 2, Regex("Trending").findAll(extracted).count()) + + val cleaned = RecirculationWidgets.strip(extracted)!! + + assertEquals(0, Regex("Trending").findAll(cleaned).count()) + assertTrue(cleaned.contains("Leavitt officially stepped down as White House press secretary")) + assertTrue(cleaned.contains("The New York Times")) + assertTrue( + "barely any of the article should have gone with the widgets", + cleaned.length > extracted.length - 600 + ) + } +} -- cgit v1.2.3