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★ 8 Open GitHub ↗

Bot Tom sends the daily video "Tagesschau in 100 Sekunden auf Arabisch" (German news in 100 seconds in Arabic) to a WhatsApp group with refugees.

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# BotTom News

Sends the [daily video](https://www.tagesschau.de/100s/arabisch/) "Tagesschau in 100 Sekunden auf Arabisch" (German news in 100 seconds in Arabic) to a WhatsApp group with refugees.

## Table of Contents
1. **[Overview](#overview)**
1. **[Installation](#installation)**
1. **[Usage](#usage)**
    1. **[Disclaimer](#disclaimer)**
    1. **[Private Information](#private-information)**
    1. **[Execution](#execution)**
1. **[Errors](#errors)**
    1. **[FFVideo](#ffvideo)**
    1. **[yowsup](#yowsup)**
1. **[Results](#results)**

## Overview

**Why?** Because [the ones I know](https://jonas-thelemann.de/portfolio/faq/#refugees) are - at the moment - not all able to understand complex German sentences and should still be informed about what is going on in Germany and the rest of our world.

Nevertheless it should be easy to switch to the [German version](https://www.tagesschau.de/100sekunden/) of the "Tagesschau in 100 Sekunden" or even the [English one](http://www.tagesschau.de/100s/englisch/).

**Why did you call this project "bottomnews"?** Because it creates a robot named "Tom" that can send news automatically directly from the (or abbreviated "ft.", like in music titles) source / the bottom.

**What else can this program do?** It answers private (but no group) messages in a realistic style. The visible steps are:

- Receive all messages
- Come online
- Read new messages for every contact
- Write
- "Check for mistakes" (stop typing)
- Echo every last message (to prevent a ban)
- Go offline

**What is left to do?** The code is a modified version of [yowsup's cli demo](). It contains a lot of unused functions and other unneeded leftovers which can be removed. Also the variables every user has to set (see [Usage / Private Information](#privateinformation)) spread across different files and could be packed together into a single one.

## Installation

This project builds on top of [yowsup], an unofficial WhatsApp API written in Python. To install it follow these [installation instructions](https://github.com/tgalal/yowsup/#installation).

## Usage

### Disclaimer

First of all: WhatsApp does not allow the usage of yowsup. So here's a ...

**Warning: Do not use your primary phone number with unofficial WhatsApp APIs!**

You risk a ban of your phone number which makes it impossible for your friends to contact you and a lot of work for you, e. g. if you've enabled 2 factor authentification on any website.

### Private Information

Of course I did not include my real phone number, password and contact list in the source. You have to replace it with your data which can be obtained from [yowsup's registration instructions](https://github.com/tgalal/yowsup/wiki/yowsup-cli-2.0).

Files that contain asterisks and need personal configuration:

- newsbot/layer.py ([L73](https://github.com/Dargmuesli/bottomnews/blob/master/newsbot/layer.py#L73), [L92](https://github.com/Dargmuesli/bottomnews/blob/master/newsbot/layer.py#L92), [L93](https://github.com/Dargmuesli/bottomnews/blob/master/newsbot/layer.py#L93), [L94](https://github.com/Dargmuesli/bottomnews/blob/master/newsbot/layer.py#L94))
- newsbot/bottomnews.py ([L38](https://github.com/Dargmuesli/bottomnews/blob/master/newsbot/bottomnews.py#L38))
- config

### Execution

The main executable is `bottomnews.py` which accepts the `--verbose` argument.

## Errors

It took me a long time to get yowsup running. There were several problems that did not only originate from yowsup itself. The following paragraphs describe the fixes I applied and offer a downloadable solution.

### FFVideo

For everybody who does not know, [here you can find FFVideo's source](https://bitbucket.org/zakhar/ffvideo/wiki/Home).

#### 1. Incompatibility

##### Description

At the time of development (Q3 2016) FFVideo's extremely outdated version `0.0.13` could not be installed on my Raspberry Pi 2B running Raspbian Jessie via `pip` without errors and warnings. Ignoring the warnings I found out that the source's string `r_frame_rate` was not supported any more. This could be related to _my_ installed versions of [FFmpeg](https://ffmpeg.org/) and its extensions, so you might not have this problem.

##### Solution

You can see my steps to the solution in [my comments under issue 1689](https://github.com/tgalal/yowsup/issues/1689#issuecomment-245154280) and a downloadable fix in [my GitHub repository Dargmuesli/FFVideo](https://bitbucket.org/Dargmuesli/ffvideo). Though, I do not guarantee endless availability.

If you want to fix it yourself replace all occurrences of the string `r_frame_rate` with `avg_frame_rate` in the source file `FFVideo.c` and install that.

### Yowsup

Yowsup gave me two main problems that were pretty hard to fix as I was completely new to Python.

#### 1. Import

##### Description

This problem stands somehow in relation to FFVideo, but is definitly a problem within yowsup. It seems like [importlib's](https://docs.python.org/2/library/importlib.html) `import_module` does not like my fixed install of FFVideo (or something else). It complains that it can't be imported while a simple `import FFVideo` in the python command shell does work fine.

##### Solution

The fix is admittedly dirty, but it works. To [/yowsup/common/tools.py](https://github.com/tgalal/yowsup/blob/master/yowsup/common/tools.py) add one import and change the `VideoTools` class:

```python
from ffvideo import VideoStream

class VideoTools:
    @staticmethod
    def getVideoProperties(videoFile):
        s = VideoStream(videoFile)
        return s.width, s.height, s.bitrate, s.duration

@staticmethod
    def generatePreviewFromVideo(videoFile):
        fd, path = tempfile.mkstemp('.jpg')
        stream = VideoStream(videoFile)
        stream.get_frame_at_sec(0).image().save(path)
        preview = ImageTools.generatePreviewFromImage(path)
        os.remove(path)
        return preview
```

I simply removed this is both functions:

```python
    with FFVideoOptionalModule() as imp:
        VideoStream = imp("VideoStream")
```

#### 2. Attribute

##### Description

The act of sending a video via yowsup is <abbr title="Q3 2016">currently</abbr> doomed to failure. Whoever tries gets the error:

```python
AttributeError: "type object 'DownloadableMediaMessageProtocolEntity' has no attribute 'fromFilePath'"
```

No wonder, that's because `DownloadableMediaMessageProtocolEntity` actually has no `attribute 'fromFilePath'` because it's not a `VideoDownloadableMediaMessageProtocolEntity` (note the "Video"). Who could've thought! I believe that is caused by the fact that - while yowsup is not really being discontinued - its pull requests haven't been merged for a long time <abbr title="Q3 2016">now</abbr>. The one that fixes this problem is [#1564](https://github.com/tgalal/yowsup/pull/1564) labeled "_Builder support for audio and video upload_". Nice.

##### Solution

Either replace the corresponding original files in `/yowsup/layers/protocol_media/protocolentities/` with a copy of [the fixed audio file](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tanquetav/yowsup/75f548f78867ccc08821309d1c796b378d4b299d/yowsup/layers/protocol_media/protocolentities/message_media_downloadable_audio.py) and/or [the fixed video file](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tanquetav/yowsup/75f548f78867ccc08821309d1c796b378d4b299d/yowsup/layers/protocol_media/protocolentities/message_media_downloadable_video.py) by [tanquetav] or install [my GitHub repository Dargmuesli/yowsup-mediafix][1] the usual way.

#### 3. Encoding

##### Description

Receiving emoticons resulted in errors similar to the following:

```python
UnicodeEncodeError: "'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 0-1: ordinal not in range(128)"
```

##### Solution

I added a simple `.encode('utf-8')` to [layer.py L622](https://github.com/Dargmuesli/bottomnews/blob/master/newsbot/layer.py#L622) and

```python
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf8')
```

to [L32 f.](https://github.com/Dargmuesli/bottomnews/blob/master/newsbot/layer.py#L32). In [L47](https://github.com/Dargmuesli/bottomnews/blob/master/newsbot/layer.py#L47) I added just one `u`:

```python
MESSAGE_FORMAT = u"[{FROM}({TIME})]:[{MESSAGE_ID}]\t {MESSAGE}"
```

#### 4. Media

##### Description

Once I thought this bot was well tested enough I added it to the WhatsApp group
with my friends. Well, it turned out that yowsup has problems handling some
media message types like audio, location, document and url. So I quickly headed
over to [jlguardi's yowsup fork](https://github.com/jlguardi/yowsup) and searched all commits for media related ones. I changed several files, but finally got it working.

##### Solution

###### `/layers/protocol_media/layer.py`

Add the following two imports:

```python
from .protocolentities import DocumentDownloadableMediaMessageProtocolEntity
from .protocolentities import UrlMediaMessageProtocolEntity
```

Append these `elif`-checks to the large `if`-statement in the middle:

```python
elif mediaNode.getAttributeValue("type") == "url":
    entity = UrlMediaMessageProtocolEntity.fromProtocolTreeNode(node)
    self.toUpper(entity)
elif mediaNode.getAttributeValue("type") == "document":
    entity = DocumentDownloadableMediaMessageProtocolEntity.fromProtocolTreeNode(node)
    self.toUpper(entity)
```

###### `/layers/protocol_media/protocolentities/__init__.py`

This is a fairly simple addition:

```python
from .message_media_downloadable_document import DocumentDownloadableMediaMessageProtocolEntity
from .message_media_url import UrlMediaMessageProtocolEntity
```

###### `/layers/protocol_media/protocolentities/message_media_downloadable_document.py`

This is a whole new file. Copy [it from my fork][1].

###### `/layers/protocol_media/protocolentities/message_media_url.py`

The same applies to this file. Copy [it from my fork][1] too.

###### `/layers/axolotl/layer_receive.py`

Again, append these `elif`-checks to the large `if`-statement in the middle:

```python
elif m.HasField("video_message"):
    handled = True
    self.handleVideoMessage(node, m.video_message)
elif m.HasField("audio_message"):
    handled = True
    self.handleAudioMessage(node, m.audio_message)
```

```python
Then add the appropriate message handler functions:

def handleAudioMessage(self, originalEncNode, audioMessage):
    messageNode = copy.deepcopy(originalEncNode)
    messageNode["type"] = "media"
    mediaNode = ProtocolTreeNode("media", {
        "type": "audio",
        "filehash": audioMessage.file_sha256,
        "size": str(audioMessage.file_length),
        "url": audioMessage.url,
        "mimetype": audioMessage.mime_type,
        "duration": str(audioMessage.duration),
        "seconds": str(audioMessage.duration),
        "encoding": "raw",
        "file": "enc",
        "ip": "0",
        "mediakey": audioMessage.media_key
    })
    messageNode.addChild(mediaNode)

self.toUpper(messageNode)

def handleVideoMessage(self, originalEncNode, videoMessage):
    messageNode = copy.deepcopy(originalEncNode)
    messageNode["type"] = "media"
    mediaNode = ProtocolTreeNode("media", {
        "type": "video",
        "filehash": videoMessage.file_sha256,
        "size": str(videoMessage.file_length),
        "url": videoMessage.url,
        "mimetype": videoMessage.mime_type,
        "duration": str(videoMessage.duration),
        "seconds": str(videoMessage.duration),
        "caption": videoMessage.caption,
        "encoding": "raw",
        "file": "enc",
        "ip": "0",
        "mediakey": videoMessage.media_key
    }, data = videoMessage.jpeg_thumbnail)
    messageNode.addChild(mediaNode)

self.toUpper(messageNode)
```

If you want you can also fix the already present but empty message handler functions for url and document messages a little bit further down:

```python
def handleUrlMessage(self, originalEncNode, urlMessage):
    messageNode = copy.deepcopy(originalEncNode)
    messageNode["type"] = "media"
    mediaNode = ProtocolTreeNode("media", {
        "type": "url",
        "text": urlMessage.text,
        "match": urlMessage.matched_text,
        "url": urlMessage.canonical_url,
        "description": urlMessage.description,
        "title": urlMessage.title
    }, data = urlMessage.jpeg_thumbnail)
    messageNode.addChild(mediaNode)

self.toUpper(messageNode)

def handleDocumentMessage(self, originalEncNode, documentMessage):
    messageNode = copy.deepcopy(originalEncNode)
    messageNode["type"] = "media"
    mediaNode = ProtocolTreeNode("media", {
        "type": "document",
        "url": documentMessage.url,
        "mimetype": documentMessage.mime_type,
        "title": documentMessage.title,
        "filehash": documentMessage.file_sha256,
        "size": str(documentMessage.file_length),
        "pages": str(documentMessage.page_count),
        "mediakey": documentMessage.media_key
    }, data = documentMessage.jpeg_thumbnail)
    messageNode.addChild(mediaNode)

self.toUpper(messageNode)
```

The last step is to correct a spelling mistake. Search for `degress_longitude` and replace it with `degrees_longitude`.

###### `/layers/protocol_messages/proto/wa.proto`

This file needs to change almost in its entirety. Copy [the whole file in my fork][1].

###### `/layers/protocol_messages/proto/wa_pb2.py`

The same applies to this file. Copy [the whole file in my fork][1] too.

## Results

The deployment worked out well, without any issues. After several questions about the identity of `BotTom News` arose, I decided to ask the refugees whether they'd like to keep receiving daily news videos in our WhatsApp group. The answer an unmistakable "No":

![Straw Poll](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dargmuesli/bottom-news/master/resources/strawpoll.png)

Thus, I discontinued the bot's activity.

Eventhough my offer was rejected, I learned much from reading and understanding yowsup's mostly undocumented source code and I'm glad that the refugees I know are completely honest with me.

[yowsup]: https://github.com/tgalal/yowsup/
[tanquetav]: https://github.com/tanquetav/
[1]: https://github.com/Dargmuesli/yowsup/tree/bottomnews_fixes

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