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can’t wait to share the fun with my colleagues at raileurope tomorrow morning 😅☕️

Oh I wanna talk to y'all at some point - I use RailEurope all the time :) Are you all interested in surfacing real time data if it was more easially acessible?

The Italo account area allows you to manage their newsletters. If you try to disable one, it just errors.

Peak italian software

Oh dear, I could probably write a very similar thread on the Warsaw public transit API. Just look at the website! api.um.warszawa.pl

The website does not load from here, but just the fact that it does have a public API endpoint makes it hundred years ahead of the Italian ones!

i used a VPN, and man, it is a thing of beauty that cannot be described in words. like someone turned a powerpoint into a website.

Italo's app sends a "Login" request on startup with a hardcoded username and password, which coincidentially also is entirely unnecessary, because the data it fetches with the returned data is available without authentication!

Trenitalia's internal API for getting the real-time travel info for a train has a beautiful translation error: the platform identifier field is called `binary`, because in Italian, platform is "binario".

And the value is "2" 😂

This endpoint has another great design choice: the departure and arrival data is stored in two arrays with fields with a description of either "Scheduled departure", "Actual Departure", "Scheduled Arrival", or "Actual Arrival". Note the capitalization difference between "departure" and "arrival".

Is it valid XML and JSON at least? I integrated with a transport API many years ago that was XML wrapped in some ancient invalid HTML 3 – only way to reasonably extract anything from it was to go crazy with regexp, at least that was my approach back then

Yes valid JSON, I didn’t look into the XML much

Also reminds me of how often people forget to escape </script> tags when they stringify data to JSON for inclusion in HTML – mixing formats like that is sure to create some oversights and mess