Find final URL by crawling until “congrats”

Q: Find final URL by crawling until “congrats”

This question evaluates a candidate's competency in implementing robust HTTP-based crawling and traversal logic, including response parsing, retry and error handling, and termination detection.

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Question

You are given a starting HTTP URL. Implement a function that repeatedly calls URLs returned by previous responses until you reach a response that indicates success.

Behavior:

Make an HTTP GET request to a URL.
The response body can be one of:
1. A success marker (e.g., the body equals the string "congrats" ).
2. A payload that contains a list of new URLs to call next (possibly alongside other fields/data).
3. Other data that does not contain any new URLs (a dead end).
Continue iterating/recursing through returned URLs until you find a URL whose response is "congrats" .

Requirements:

Return only the final URL that produced the "congrats" response (you do NOT need to return the path of URLs taken).
Print/log each HTTP response you receive before deciding how to parse it and what to do next.
Handle error cases, especially HTTP 503 (Service Unavailable): implement reasonable retry behavior and error handling for malformed/unexpected response bodies.
The solution should be practical and focused on getting the core logic working first; coding style is not the priority.

Clarify any assumptions you need (e.g., max retries, backoff strategy, cycle detection, concurrency).

Find final URL by crawling until “congrats”

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