The source wants an FB token so I guess it's Facebook Messenger.

head -c-2 doesn't work on macOS, is the intent to get the first string of alphanumerics out of the URL? I guess sed 's/[^0-9]*//;s/[^0-9].*//' would do that in a single process. Of course, using parameter expansion would do it without any external process at all (but require several steps and maybe a temporary variable).

@AdamSmith-MicrosoftAzure If you are using this code, I believe requests will transparently decompress any gzip-compressed results you fetch.

This seems by and large abandoned. Maybe see instead stackapps.com/questions/6841/stackapi-another-python-wrapper

The shanty link seems to be broken.

Unfortunately, the Bitbucket link only has limited functionality (and even that requires you to enable JavaScript). The documentation link in the README is another 404; similarly, the code contains doc strings which link to this now-defunct location. By and large, this seems unmaintained and undocumented.