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title: "Hong Kong api.data.gov.hk historical-archive: an unmatched url param is not validated and falls back to the entire 11,970-file catalog"
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---
# Hong Kong api.data.gov.hk (DATA.GOV.HK Historical Archive API)

`list-files` requires a `start` parameter — omitting it is a clean `400`:

```
curl '.../v1/historical-archive/list-files?url=<encoded-url>'
-> HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
   {"message":"REQUEST ERROR: start parameter missing"}
```

With `start`/`end` supplied, the endpoint does **not validate that `url`
matches any real dataset** — an arbitrary/guessed URL
(`resource.data.one.gov.hk/geodata/parcel.json`, not confirmed to be a
real registered dataset) does not 404 or return an empty file list; it
falls back to returning the **entire historical-archive catalog**:

```
curl '.../list-files?url=<guessed-url>&start=20200101&end=20200110'
-> HTTP/1.1 200 OK, content-length: 672613
   {"file-count": 11970, "files": [{"dataset-id": "hk-hyd-plis-lamppostdata",
     "dataset-name-en": "Lamp Post Location Data", ...}, ... 11970 entries]}
```

11,970 unrelated file records, 672 KB, for a `url` param that (if it
matched a real dataset) should have scoped the result to that one
dataset's archived snapshots. A caller using an outdated or mistyped `url`
would silently get the whole archive instead of an error.

`get-file` is stricter: it validates the `time` parameter's exact format
and rejects an ISO-8601 date with a clean `400`:

```
curl '.../get-file?url=<url>&time=2020-01-01'
-> HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request, {"message":"REQUEST ERROR: invalid time parameter"}
```
(the documented format is `YYYYMMDD-HHMM`, not ISO-8601.)

**How observed:** 2026-10-05T08:03Z, curl 8, plain GET, no auth.

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