Get Wayback Machine Snapshot Content
ia_get_snapshotRead-onlyIdempotent
Fetch the archived content of a URL at a specific Wayback Machine timestamp. Resolves to the nearest available capture when the exact timestamp has no snapshot. Returns the archived page as readable plain text (HTML stripped) and the replay URL of the capture Wayback served, for browser access. Use ia_find_snapshots first to discover valid timestamps for a URL.
Input Schema
TableJSON Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| url | Yes | The URL whose archived content to retrieve. | |
| timestamp | Yes | Target Wayback timestamp in YYYYMMDDHHMMSS format (or any prefix). The nearest available snapshot will be resolved and fetched. Example: "20200101120000" for noon on January 1, 2020. |
Output Schema
TableJSON Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| text | No | Readable plain text extracted from the archived HTML: scripts, styles, comments, and tags removed, character references decoded, whitespace collapsed. Capped at the server-configured IA_MAX_SNAPSHOT_CHARS limit (default 50 000 characters). Taken from at most the first 4 MiB of the page; a notice says so when a page is longer. | |
| error | No | Present when the call failed. Absent on success. | |
| notice | No | Set when the page is longer than the 4 MiB read limit: the text comes from its first bytes only. | |
| replay_url | No | Wayback Machine replay URL (https://web.archive.org) of the capture the text came from — where the fetch ended after any redirect Wayback issued to the capture it served. | |
| resolved_status | No | HTTP status Wayback replayed the capture the text came from with — the same capture as resolved_timestamp and replay_url. | |
| resolved_timestamp | No | Timestamp (YYYYMMDDHHMMSS) of the capture the text came from, read from replay_url. |