Error in Google Sheets Script when parsing XML - google-apps-script

Question

I have this function running in a Google Sheets script that pulls HTML from subreddits and returns them to a spreadsheet. It works for me some/most of the time, but other times I get an error "Could not parse text. (line 13)" which is the line with var doc = Xml.parse(page, true);. Any idea why this is happening or is this just a bug with Google Scripts? Here's the code that works...sometimes.
function getRedditHTML() {
var entries_array = [];
var subreddit_array = ['https://www.reddit.com/r/news/','https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/','https://www.reddit.com/r/science/'];
for (var s = 0; s < subreddit_array.length; s++) {
var page = UrlFetchApp.fetch(subreddit_array[s]);
//this is Line 13 that is breaking
var doc = Xml.parse(page, true);
var bodyHtml = doc.html.body.toXmlString();
doc = XmlService.parse(bodyHtml);
var root = doc.getRootElement();
var entries = getElementsByClassName(root,'thing');
for (var i = 0; i < entries.length; i++) {
var title = getElementsByClassName(entries[i],'title');
title = XmlService.getRawFormat().format(title[1]).replace(/<[^>]*>/g, "");
var link = getElementsByClassName(entries[i],'comments');
link = link[0].getAttribute('href').getValue();
var rank = getElementsByClassName(entries[i],'rank');
rank = rank[0].getValue();
var likes = getElementsByClassName(entries[i],'likes');
likes = likes[0].getValue();
entries_array.push([rank, likes, title, link]);
}
}
return entries_array.sort(function (a, b) {
return b[1] - a[1];
});
}

Answer 1

Here is what I found upon playing with importXML (my usual way of doing this) - for some reason I cannot narrow down - it DOES appear to randomly stall out and return null for a few minutes - so I'm guessing the issue with your thing is not the code but that the site or google temporarily blocks/won't return the data -
however I found the JSON endpoint to the piece you want - and I noticed that when XML went down - the JSON didnt.
You can take that and fix it to push your own array of topics/urls - I just left it for one link for now to show you how the URL breaks down and where it should be modified:
The URL is 'https://www.reddit.com/r/news/hot.json?raw_json=1&subredditName=news&sort=top&t=day&feature=link_preview&sr_detail=true&app=mweb-client
News is mentioned in 2 places so just modify all your URLs to follow that method - you can easily load that javascript in a browser to see all the fields available
Also the portion hot.json is where you can change whether you want the ranked list (called hot), or new,top,promoted, etc. you just change that keyword.
Score is the same as the upvotes/likes
function getSubReddit() {
var ss = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet();
var sheet = ss.getActiveSheet(); //get Active sheet
var subject = 'news';
var url = 'https://www.reddit.com/r/' + subject + '/hot.json?raw_json=1&subredditName=' + subject + '&sort=top&t=day&feature=link_preview&sr_detail=true&app=mweb-client'; //json endpoint for data
var response = UrlFetchApp.fetch(url); // get api endpoint
var json = response.getContentText(); // get the response content as text
var redditData = JSON.parse(json); //parse text into json
Logger.log(redditData); //log data to logger to check
//create empty array to hold data points
var statsRows = [];
var date = new Date(); //create new date for timestamp
//The following lines push the parsed json into empty stats array
for (var j=0;j<25;j++){
for (var i =0;i<25;i++){
var stats=[];
stats.push(date);//timestamp
stats.push(i+1);
stats.push(redditData.data.children[i].data.score); //score
stats.push(redditData.data.children[i].data.title); //title
stats.push(redditData.data.children[i].data.url); //article url
// stats.push('http://www.reddit.com' + redditData.data.children[i].data.permalink); //reddit permalink
statsRows.push(stats)
}
//append the stats array to the active sheet
sheet.appendRow(statsRows[j])
}
}