A snippet to guess the shoutkey for LTI colloquiums

guess_colloquium.py

import itertools
from typing import List, Optional

import requests


def get_url(url_base: str, xs: List[int]) -> str:
    return url_base + "".join(chr(x + 97) for x in xs)


def attempt(date: str, speaker_last_name: str) -> Optional[str]:
    url_base = f"http://aladdin3.inf.cs.cmu.edu/colcheck/?k={speaker_last_name}_{date}"

    for n_letters in range(0, 2 + 1):
        for xs in itertools.product(*[range(26) for _ in range(n_letters)]):
            url = get_url(url_base, xs)
            r = requests.get(url)
            if b"img" in r.content:
                return url
    
    return None


if __name__ == '__main__':
    date = "0124"
    speaker_last_name = "starzl"
    url = attempt(date, speaker_last_name)
    if url is None:
        print("Failed")
    else:
        print(url)