bugs? search scripts just catch `httpx.HTTPStatusError`

[m-dmupba]

A bunch of the search scripts just catch httpx.HTTPStatusError, wrap it into a generic Exception, and then only send str(e) back. That means they throw away the response body. And on most of these APIs (PubMed / Semantic Scholar / GitHub) the response body is basically where the real “what went wrong” explanation is.

Details

For example in skills/sn-search-academic/scripts/pubmed_search.py:160:

except Exception as e:
    print_json(make_result(False, args.query, "pubmed", [], str(e)))
    sys.exit(1)

For an HTTPStatusError, str(e) usually looks like:

Client error '422 Unprocessable Entity' for url '...'

Okay, that part is helpful. But it still drops resp.text. With GitHub, resp.text is often something like:

{"message": "Validation Failed", "errors": [...]}

That’s the part you actually want to debug.

Instead, add a tiny helper in search_utils.py to keep the response body when it exists:

def format_error(e: Exception) -> str:
    if isinstance(e, httpx.HTTPStatusError):
        body = e.response.text[:500] if e.response is not None else ""
        return f"{e}: {body}"
    return str(e)

Then every script’s except block can just use the same formatting, and you don’t lose the useful error details.