Feature request: Telegraph crosswords support

[isabelgk]

I'm new to Kotlin, so I may be interested in poking around to try my hand at this one, but in the meantime, I wanted to put in a request for crosswords from telegraph.co.uk.

This library is very impressive. Thanks for all your work on it.

[jpd236]

Thanks for the request!

I'm certainly supportive of adding this. The main problem from my perspective is that it requires a paid subscription and there are no free sample puzzles, just a limited-time free trial. So even if I can get it to work with the trial, maintaining it as the site changes or things break would require an ongoing subscription. (And I don't want to ask for someone else to donate a subscription because that feels like it would lead to expectations of keeping it working, which may not be feasible depending on how the site changes or my own availability).

If you'd like to try contributing, I'd be more than happy to help however I can.

Another option is if I can be pointed to enough information about how to access the puzzle, I could try adding support and can iterate on it with someone who has a subscription. The key things would be:

• (Assuming you want this to work with Crossword Scraper as well) Information on how to extract the puzzle data on a particular puzzle page. This is a bit of an art but in general we can access any global Javascript variable from the page, including iframes on it. Less desirably, we can also make network requests to the same API that the page is using along. I'll typically use Chrome inspector tools to monitor network traffic and see if I can find where the puzzle is loaded, which at least gives me the API call to use, and then look at the call site to see if it's stashed anywhere that can be extracted directly.
• Example data in the format to be parsed. (I wouldn't want to post copyrighted content here, but if example data is scraped, then it could be edited to instead represent a simple example puzzle, with unnecessary fields removed).

If you can't make progress, I can always sign up for a trial to try and bootstrap things if/when I have time, though if things break, I'd need help to fix them.

[isabelgk]

Thanks so much for considering! I have recently gotten into cryptic crosswords and had been starting to play ones on xwordinfo and free ones from the Telegraph, not noticing eventually it would ask me to pay for a subscription. 😄

If I end up digging into it, I'll start out with your helpful pointers, and see where I go from there!

Thanks again for the thoughtful response.