Troubleshooting

Authentication Errors

Problem: AuthenticationError: Invalid API credentials

• Verify your API key and secret key from the AskPablos dashboard

• Use environment variables instead of hardcoding keys

import os
client = AskPablos(
    api_key=os.getenv("ASKPABLOS_API_KEY"),
    secret_key=os.getenv("ASKPABLOS_SECRET_KEY")
)

Connection / Timeout Errors

Problem: APIConnectionError or RequestTimeoutError

• Increase the timeout value

• Increase max_retries

response = client.get(
    "https://slow-website.com",
    timeout=60,
    max_retries=5
)

XPath Returns No Results

Problem: dom.xpath(...) returns an empty list even though the element exists on the site.

The page content is likely JavaScript-rendered. Use operations with waitForElement so the browser waits for the element to appear before capturing the HTML:

from lxml import etree

response = client.get(
    url="https://example.com",
    browser=True,
    operations=[{
        "task": "waitForElement",
        "match": {
            "on": "xpath",
            "rule": "visible",
            "value": "//ul[@class='prod_list']"
        }
    }]
)

dom = etree.HTML(response.content)
items = dom.xpath("//ul[@class='prod_list']/li")

Note

Always use from lxml import etree. Python’s stdlib xml.etree has no HTML() method and will silently fail.

Screenshot Not Captured

Problem: response.screenshot is None

screenshot=True requires browser=True:

response = client.get(
    "https://example.com",
    browser=True,   # required
    screenshot=True
)

Parameter Validation Error

Problem: ValueError: browser=True is required for screenshot=True

Any browser feature (screenshot, operations) requires browser=True.

Debugging

Enable debug logging to inspect requests:

import logging
from askpablos_api import configure_logging

configure_logging(level=logging.DEBUG)