zyAnswers

This program scrapes the correct answers for participation activity questions in a zyBooks section.

The types of questions currently supported are:

• Multiple Choice
• Short Answer

How it works

When you load a zybooks section, zybooks makes a get request to one of its APIs which contains every single question and answer on the page in a single JSON object. This program simply makes that get request for itself and filters out the answers from the JSON data.

Compilation

1. Make sure cargo and rust are installed, then clone this repository.
2. Run cargo build --release to compile the project. The binary will be in ./target/release/

If you're on Arch Linux, check the releases section for a PKGBUILD file.

How to use

1. Compile the program for your device
2. Go to zyBooks and get the following information:

• your zyBook code (Ex: WebProgrammingR37)
• the chapter and section you want the answers for (Ex: 7.11 Using third-party web APIs (JavaScript); i.e. chapter 7, section 11)
• your zyBooks auth token (See Getting your zyBooks auth token)

3. Run the binary from the terminal Ex:

$ zyanswers --auth-token <your token> --chapter <chapter> --section <section> --zybook-code <your zybook code>

Getting your zyBooks auth token

Caution

DO NOT GIVE ANYBODY YOUR AUTH TOKEN as it is essentially the same as giving them your zyBooks username and password. This program only uses your token to send a GET request to zyserver.zybooks.com to access the specific chapter and section of your zybook that you requested.

On Firefox

1. Go to zybooks.com, log-in, and inspect element.
2. Go to the Storage tab
3. Navigate into Local Storage > https://learn.zybooks.com
4. Click on the cookie that has the key ember_simple_auth-session-5
5. On the right where the data should've appeared, navigate into authenticated > session > auth_token
6. The value between the quotes is your auth token.

On other browsers

1. Look up how to view cookies in depth (the actual keys and values)
2. Navigate to the same cookie described in the Firefox section

Binaries

I don't provide precompiled binaries because I'm too lazy to. It's really not hard to compile it yourself