affaan-m/ECC · error · ValueError

unsupported remote content type

Error message

unsupported remote content type: {content_type}

What it means

Raised by _fetch_import_url when the fetched response's Content-Type header is present but does not contain any allowed token (text/, markdown, yaml, json, octet-stream). The CLI only accepts content types it can safely treat as a text/markdown instinct file. This prevents pulling binary or executable content from remote URLs.

Solutions

  1. Point the import URL at the raw file (e.g. raw.githubusercontent.com instead of an HTML blob page) so the server returns text/plain or text/markdown.
  2. Fix server MIME configuration to serve .yaml/.md as text/yaml or text/markdown.
  3. Verify the URL is correct — a 404/redirect page often comes with an unexpected content type.
  4. Check the header before calling: urllib request and inspect Content-Type against the allowed list.

Example fix

# before
url = "https://example.com/files/instincts"  # served as application/pdf
# after
url = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/org/repo/main/instincts.yaml"  # text/plain
Defensive patterns

Strategy: validation

Validate before calling

import urllib.request
req = urllib.request.Request(source, method="HEAD")
with urllib.request.urlopen(req, timeout=15) as r:
    ct = r.headers.get("Content-Type", "")
allowed = ("text/", "markdown", "yaml", "json", "octet-stream")
if ct and not any(a in ct.lower() for a in allowed):
    raise ValueError(f"unsupported content type: {ct}")

Try / catch

try:
    cli_import(url=source)
except ValueError as e:
    if "content type" in str(e):
        print("URL must serve text/markdown/yaml/json content")

Prevention

When it happens

Trigger: Server responds with Content-Type like application/x-executable, application/zip, text/html is fine (text/) but e.g. image/png, application/octet-stream variants are allowed — fails on application/pdf, video/mp4, application/x-msdownload, or empty-allowlist mismatches like 'application/x-yaml; charset=UTF-16'.

Common situations: The URL redirects to an HTML login page served as text/html (allowed) vs. a CDN serving image/png for a mistyped link; a server misconfigured to emit application/binary; a link pointing at an archive rather than the raw file.

Understand the failure class

Background: UnsupportedOperationException and "is not supported" errors: when a library deliberately refuses a call — this error's family across 30 libraries.

Related errors

AI-assisted analysis of affaan-m/ECC@8321021c54 (2026-09-16). Data as JSON: /api/errors/1aad851908b9476c. Report an issue: GitHub.

Appendix: source

Thrown at skills/continuous-learning-v2/scripts/instinct-cli.py:231

            or ip.is_reserved
            or ip.is_unspecified
        ):
            raise ValueError(f"remote import host resolves to a non-public address: {host}")

    return urllib.parse.urlunparse(parsed)


def _fetch_import_url(source: str, *, max_bytes: int = 2 * 1024 * 1024) -> str:
    """Fetch a validated remote instinct file with bounded size and timeout."""
    url = _validate_import_url(source)
    req = urllib.request.Request(url, headers={"User-Agent": "ECC-instinct-import/2"})
    with urllib.request.urlopen(req, timeout=15) as response:
        content_type = response.headers.get("Content-Type", "")
        if content_type and not any(
            allowed in content_type.lower()
            for allowed in ("text/", "markdown", "yaml", "json", "octet-stream")
        ):
            raise ValueError(f"unsupported remote content type: {content_type}")
        data = response.read(max_bytes + 1)
    if len(data) > max_bytes:
        raise ValueError(f"remote import exceeds {max_bytes} bytes")
    return data.decode("utf-8")


def _yaml_quote(value: str) -> str:
    """Quote a string for safe YAML frontmatter serialization.

    Uses double quotes and escapes embedded double-quote characters to
    prevent malformed YAML when the value contains quotes.
    """
    escaped = value.replace('\\', '\\\\').replace('"', '\\"')
    return f'"{escaped}"'


# ─────────────────────────────────────────────
# Project Detection (Python equivalent of detect-project.sh)

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