ASCII drawing appearing as JSON response of request to Google

Question

I am currently working on a small php library which would allow users to access data from the Google Play Developer Console, and insert it into a database, for future use.

To achieve this, I authenticate into the corresponding Google service with GET and POST requests (this part is still ok) and then do various POST requests to get all the data I need.

Everything was working fine, I got the script itself functioning (for fetching JSON responses) since 2 or 3 weeks, and I am launching it on a daily basis since then : no problems.

Today, I tried to launch it again, and as a JSON response for any POST request, I'm getting this :

I swear this is no fake, yet it's quite scary. Is Google trolling me right now? Plus, the web version of the console still works, it just seems that my requests from outside don't.

I'm working on a localhost, so the hacking possibility is near (if not) 0, and I'm really worried that I made all this work for nothing.

if Google is actually trying to silence me from fetching data, plus making me rage, they are doing it right.

I've been googling this with all sort of keywords, still no luck.

Answer 1

Actually, I have solved this problem. As Google Webkit seems to regularly change the format of its JSON responses, my parsing and regular expressions were not working anymore to get the correct identifiers for authentication. I still think Google is trolling users or developers of non-official APIs, but now I have found a solution : manually check my parsing functions, adapting them to get every right value, and it's working again.

It's a pain, but if someone ever gets this problem and ends here, you know what to do!

(I can't be more precise, since these changes are totally random, but those are guidelines.)