fix: graceful handling of Scholar rate-limit + skip timestamp-only commits

Author: Linzy19

.github/workflows/update-scholar.yml

@@ -18,24 +18,44 @@ jobs:
     runs-on: ubuntu-latest
     steps:
       - name: Checkout
-        uses: actions/checkout@v4
+        uses: actions/checkout@v5
 
       - name: Set up Python
-        uses: actions/setup-python@v5
+        uses: actions/setup-python@v6
         with:
-          python-version: '3.11'
+          python-version: '3.12'
 
       - name: Fetch scholar stats
+        id: fetch
+        continue-on-error: true
         run: python update-scholar.py
 
-      - name: Commit & push if changed
+      - name: Exit gracefully if fetch failed
+        if: steps.fetch.outcome == 'failure'
+        run: |
+          echo "::warning::Scholar fetch failed (likely rate-limited by Google). Skipping commit."
+          exit 0
+
+      - name: Commit & push if stats changed
+        if: steps.fetch.outcome == 'success'
         run: |
           git config user.name "github-actions[bot]"
           git config user.email "41898282+github-actions[bot]@users.noreply.github.com"
-          if git diff --quiet scholar.json; then
-            echo "No changes to scholar.json"
+
+          # Only compare the numerical fields; ignore timestamp-only changes
+          # so we don't spam commits when nothing actually changed.
+          if ! git diff --quiet scholar.json; then
+            # Check whether meaningful fields (excluding updated_at*) changed
+            changed=$(git diff scholar.json | grep -E '^\+[^+]' | grep -v 'updated_at' | grep -v '"source"' || true)
+            if [ -n "$changed" ]; then
+              git add scholar.json
+              git commit -m "chore: update scholar stats [skip ci]"
+              git push
+              echo "✅ Scholar stats updated."
+            else
+              echo "ℹ️  Only timestamp changed — skipping commit."
+              git checkout scholar.json
+            fi
           else
-            git add scholar.json
-            git commit -m "chore: update scholar stats [skip ci]"
-            git push
+            echo "ℹ️  No changes to scholar.json."
           fi

scholar.json

@@ -2,13 +2,13 @@
   "user": "-XWPfk4AAAAJ",
   "name": "Linzongying 林宗莹",
   "paper_count": 7,
-  "citations_all": 191,
-  "citations_recent": 191,
+  "citations_all": 192,
+  "citations_recent": 192,
   "h_index_all": 5,
   "h_index_recent": 5,
   "i10_index_all": 3,
   "i10_index_recent": 3,
-  "updated_at": "2026-04-24T06:59:07Z",
-  "updated_at_local": "2026-04-24 14:59 UTC",
+  "updated_at": "2026-04-25T04:27:13Z",
+  "updated_at_local": "2026-04-25 12:27 UTC",
   "source": "https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=-XWPfk4AAAAJ&hl=en"
 }

update-scholar.py

@@ -2,13 +2,22 @@
 """
 Fetch latest Google Scholar stats and save to scholar.json.
 Runs manually or via GitHub Actions (see .github/workflows/update-scholar.yml).
+
+Exit codes:
+  0 — success (or Google temporarily unreachable; kept existing JSON)
+  1 — fatal error (malformed local scholar.json, disk error, etc.)
+
+This script is *tolerant* to transient failures: if Google returns a
+CAPTCHA / rate-limit page, we keep the previous scholar.json untouched
+and exit 0 so the GitHub Action doesn't falsely report failure.
 """
-import urllib.request
-import re
 import json
+import os
+import re
 import ssl
-import time
 import sys
+import time
+import urllib.request
 
 USER = '-XWPfk4AAAAJ'
 URL = f'https://scholar.google.com/citations?user={USER}&hl=en'
@@ -21,20 +30,31 @@ def fetch_scholar():
     ctx.verify_mode = ssl.CERT_NONE
 
     req = urllib.request.Request(URL, headers={
-        'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) '
-                      'AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) '
-                      'Chrome/120.0 Safari/537.36',
+        'User-Agent': (
+            'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) '
+            'AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) '
+            'Chrome/120.0 Safari/537.36'
+        ),
         'Accept-Language': 'en-US,en;q=0.9',
+        'Accept': 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml',
     })
 
     with urllib.request.urlopen(req, context=ctx, timeout=30) as r:
         html = r.read().decode('utf-8', errors='ignore')
 
+    # Detect CAPTCHA / unusual traffic block pages
+    low = html.lower()
+    if 'unusual traffic' in low or 'captcha' in low or 'sorry' in low[:2000]:
+        raise RuntimeError('Google Scholar is rate-limiting this request (CAPTCHA page).')
+
     # Six number cells in the stats table:
     # citations(all), citations(since X), h(all), h(since X), i10(all), i10(since X)
     nums = re.findall(r'gsc_rsb_std">(\d+)', html)
     if len(nums) < 6:
-        raise RuntimeError(f'Could not parse stats. Found: {nums}')
+        raise RuntimeError(
+            f'Could not parse stats table. Found {len(nums)} numbers '
+            f'(expected 6). HTML length: {len(html)}'
+        )
 
     # Count publication rows
     paper_count = len(re.findall(r'class="gsc_a_tr"', html))
@@ -62,12 +82,24 @@ def fetch_scholar():
 def main():
     try:
         data = fetch_scholar()
+    except Exception as e:
+        print(f'[WARN] Scholar fetch failed: {e}', file=sys.stderr)
+        # Graceful exit — keep existing scholar.json intact.
+        # GitHub Action will skip the commit step.
+        if os.path.exists(OUT):
+            print(f'[INFO] Keeping existing {OUT} unchanged.')
+            return 0
+        # No existing file — that's a real problem.
+        print(f'[ERROR] No existing {OUT} to fall back to.', file=sys.stderr)
+        return 1
+
+    try:
         with open(OUT, 'w', encoding='utf-8') as f:
             json.dump(data, f, indent=2, ensure_ascii=False)
         print(json.dumps(data, indent=2, ensure_ascii=False))
         return 0
-    except Exception as e:
-        print(f'[ERROR] {e}', file=sys.stderr)
+    except OSError as e:
+        print(f'[ERROR] Could not write {OUT}: {e}', file=sys.stderr)
         return 1