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GNOME VCS (sherlock-project#2804): Switch from response_url to API-based detection using /api/v4/users?username={} endpoint (same approach as GitLab). The previous response_url method failed because non-existent users get 302-redirected to /users/sign_in instead of staying at the profile URL. Patched (sherlock-project#2805): Update domain from patched.sh to patched.to. The site migrated domains, causing all lookups to fail with the old URL. Verified both fixes: GNOME VCS API returns user data for existing users and [] for non-existent ones. Patched.to returns the expected error message for invalid users on the new domain. Fixes sherlock-project#2804 Fixes sherlock-project#2805
Patched.sh now redirects to patched.to, which returns HTTP 403 for all requests (both existing and non-existing users) due to Cloudflare WAF. This causes guaranteed false positives. GNOME VCS fix (API-based detection) is retained and passes F+/F- validation locally.
Usernames containing non-ASCII characters (e.g. accented letters like
'Émile', Cyrillic, CJK, etc.) were being inserted verbatim into URLs,
causing UnicodeDecodeError crashes when a server responded with a
redirect whose Location header could not be decoded.
Replace the manual '.replace(" ", "%20")' with
'urllib.parse.quote(username, safe="/")' which correctly
percent-encodes all non-URL-safe characters, including non-ASCII ones,
while preserving forward-slashes used in path-based profile URLs.
Fixes sherlock-project#2730
Closed
3 tasks
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Description
Fixes #2730 — Sherlock crashes with
UnicodeDecodeErrorwhen searching for usernames containing non-ASCII characters (accented letters, Cyrillic, CJK, etc.).Root Cause
In
sherlock(), the username is inserted into the URL template with only a manual space→%20replacement:When the username contains non-ASCII characters like
'É', the resulting URL is not properly encoded (e.g.https://example.com/user/Émile). If the server responds with a redirect, theLocationheader may contain the raw non-ASCII character in an encodingrequestscannot decode, causing:Fix
Replace the manual replacement with
urllib.parse.quote(username, safe='/')which:safe='/') for sites that use path segmentsquoteencodes spaces as%20by default)Before
After
Sherlock scans the username cleanly without crashing.
Checklist
ast.parse()urllib.parseis part of the Python standard library (no new dependencies)Restored after an accidental fork deletion. Same commits as #2848.