I’m trying to use the Google API Python client to issue requests for the Safe Browsing API v5. It seems like the client is trying to get a JSON response by default, because alt=json is automatically added to the API request URL (example generated by the client: https://safebrowsing.googleapis.com/v5/hashes:search?hashPrefixes=WwuJdQ&key=[]&alt=json)

However, with this addition, I just get an error that the format is not supported:

{
  "error": {
    "code": 400,
    "message": "Unsupported Output Format",
    "status": "INVALID_ARGUMENT"
  }
}

Q1) Does this mean that this API does not support JSON output (yet)? And this despite json being the default output format listed in the API client package’s discovery cache (discovery_cache/documents/safebrowsing.v5.json)?

I’ve also been trying to use the API with Protobuf output, because that does seem to be supported. I got as far as setting the model parameter in the service build method to ProtocolBufferModel, but then I get TypeError: request() missing 1 required positional argument: 'body_value' as an error.

Q2) Since the API does not seem to support JSON yet, how can I get the Google API Python client to work with Protobuf?

(*) I’m aware of the v5alpha1 variant of the API, which has a few more endpoints, but JSON output does not work there either.