Why “Googletrans.Translator” suddenly stopped working?

Question

I wrote a few lines using Translator function in Googletrans a few days ago. But I was trying to re-run those lines today and it popped a series of errors... I'm really confused by this. If you have experienced similar issue, please comment below. Any help is welcome!!

from googletrans import Translator
translator = Translator()
trans1 = translator.translate('Hello', dest = 'es')

The error I got is following:

AttributeError                            Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-19-c0f9e5495a2f> in <module>()
----> 1 trans1 = translator.translate('Hello', dest = 'es')

~\AppData\Local\Continuum\anaconda3\lib\site-packages\googletrans\client.py in translate(self, text, dest, src)
    170 
    171         origin = text
--> 172         data = self._translate(text, dest, src)
    173 
    174         # this code will be updated when the format is changed.

~\AppData\Local\Continuum\anaconda3\lib\site-packages\googletrans\client.py in _translate(self, text, dest, src)
     73             text = text.decode('utf-8')
     74 
---> 75         token = self.token_acquirer.do(text)
     76         params = utils.build_params(query=text, src=src, dest=dest,
     77                                     token=token)

~\AppData\Local\Continuum\anaconda3\lib\site-packages\googletrans\gtoken.py in do(self, text)
    178 
    179     def do(self, text):
--> 180         self._update()
    181         tk = self.acquire(text)
    182         return tk

~\AppData\Local\Continuum\anaconda3\lib\site-packages\googletrans\gtoken.py in _update(self)
     57         r = self.session.get(self.host)
     58         # this will be the same as python code after stripping out a reserved word 'var'
---> 59         code = unicode(self.RE_TKK.search(r.text).group(1)).replace('var ', '')
     60         # unescape special ascii characters such like a \x3d(=)
     61         if PY3:  # pragma: no cover

AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'group'

I tried to do research on this error msg, but got nothing. What confused me the most is that this simple code worked perfectly fine 3 days ago. But when i open up this morning, i popped errors. Please help. Thank you so much!

Answer 1

I got the solution below from this link.

Solution:

pip install git+https://github.com/BoseCorp/py-googletrans.git --upgrade

It worked perfectly for me!

Answer 2

DIRECTLY COPYING FROM: googletrans stopped working with error 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'group'

Apparently it's a recent and widespread problem on Google's side. Quoting various Github discussions, it happens when Google sends you directly the raw token.

It's being discussed right now and there is already a pull request to fix it, so it should be resolved in the next few days.

For reference, see:

https://github.com/ssut/py-googletrans/issues/48 <-- exact same problem reported on the Github repo https://github.com/pndurette/gTTS/issues/60 <-- seemingly same problem on a text-to-speech library https://github.com/ssut/py-googletrans/pull/78 <-- pull request to fix the issue

To apply this patch (without waiting for the pull request to be accepted) simply install the library from the forked repo https://github.com/BoseCorp/py-googletrans.git (uninstall the official library first):

$ pip uninstall googletrans $ git clone https://github.com/BoseCorp/py-googletrans.git $ cd ./py-googletrans $ python setup.py install You can clone it anywhere on your system and install it globally or while inside a virtualenv.

Answer 3

Update py-googletrans/googletrans/gtoken.py like the following:

RE_TKK = re.compile(r'TKK=eval\(\'\(\(function\(\)\{(.+?)\}\)\(\)\)\'\);',
                    re.DOTALL)
RE_RAWTKK = re.compile(r'tkk:\'([^\']*)\'',re.DOTALL)

def __init__(self, tkk='0', session=None, host='translate.google.com'):
    self.session = session or requests.Session()
    self.tkk = tkk
    self.host = host if 'http' in host else 'https://' + host

def _update(self):
    """update tkk
    """
    # we don't need to update the base TKK value when it is still valid
    now = math.floor(int(time.time() * 1000) / 3600000.0)
    if self.tkk and int(self.tkk.split('.')[0]) == now:
        return

    r = self.session.get(self.host)

    rawtkk = self.RE_RAWTKK.search(r.text)
    if rawtkk:
        self.tkk = rawtkk.group(1)
        return

Answer 4

Google has changed the way the token is created. There is no fix at the time of writing. You have to wait for googletrans to be updated.