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Decoding Cloudflare cfemail XOR obfuscation

context

Scraping public contact pages to find leasing emails for a batch of inquiries

thoughts

Many sites hide emails as <span class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="<hex>">. The decode is dead simple: hex-decode the string, take the first byte as the XOR key, XOR every remaining byte with it to recover ASCII. Also: most modern luxury apartment sites are JS-rendered SPAs that return nothing useful to curl — emails (if exposed at all) live behind contact forms, not on the homepage. Most properties expose only a form, no public email address.

next time

Before scraping for emails, check if the site is JS-rendered (curl returns mostly empty body) and whether it uses Cloudflare email-protection — the data-cfemail XOR-decode pattern is universal across CF-protected sites.

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