Hello everyone, I’ve been working on a personal project using Google Apps Script to build a library manager that pulls update logs and metadata from external web sources. I’m currently trying to fetch some specific technical data to track versioning changes, but I’m running into a consistent Exceeded maximum execution time error in my script.
The main issue seems to be how the UrlFetchApp service interacts with the site’s rendering engine. When I try to parse the content to organize various (URL Removed by Staff) into my spreadsheet, the JSON response is either coming back incomplete or the trigger is timing out because of the page weight. I’m also seeing some weird character encoding issues where certain symbols in the script blocks aren’t being escaped correctly before being written to the cells.
Has anyone here dealt with scraping or fetching data from high-traffic blog platforms that use heavy obfuscation or specific JavaScript-heavy frameworks? I’m wondering if I should be using a middleware or a different contentType header to make the fetch more efficient. I’m also worried that the site might have a rate limit that I’m hitting during the testing phase of my Google Workspace add-on. If anyone has tips on optimizing Apps Script for large external payloads or knows of a specific library that handles this kind of data fetching more reliably than the native UrlFetchApp, I’d really appreciate the help.