Wikipedia list=search REST API: how to retrieve also Url of matching articles

api url wikipedia wikipedia-api mediawiki-api
Fabio Buda picture Fabio Buda · Jan 19, 2012 · Viewed 12.3k times · Source

I'm studying Wikipedia REST API but I'm not able to find the right option to get also URLs for a search query.

this is the URL of the request:

http://it.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=search&srsearch=calvino&format=xml&srprop=snippet

this request outputs only the Title and the Snippet but no URLs for articles. I've checked wikipedia API documentation for the list=search query but seems there is no option to get also URLs.

Best Regards, Fabio Buda

Answer

svick picture svick · Jan 19, 2012

You can form the URL of the article easily by yourself from the title. For the Italian Wikipedia, it's http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/ followed by the URL-encoded title of the article. It's as simple as that.

The actual URL of the article also replaces spaces with underscores, but you don't have to do that if you don't want to, the URL with spaces redirects to the one with underscores.

EDIT: You can get the URL, but it's not possible to get search-related information at the same time. To do that, use the list as a generator. For example:

http://it.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&generator=search&gsrsearch=calvino&format=xml&gsrprop=snippet&prop=info&inprop=url

But I think changing the format of page URLs is very unlikely: too many other people rely on that.

Related questions

REST API Best practices: Where to put parameters?

A REST API can have parameters in at least two ways: As part of the URL-path (i.e. /api/resource/parametervalue ) As a query argument (i.e. /api/resource?parameter=value ) What is the best practice here? Are there any …

Read More
Allow Access-Control-Allow-Origin header using HTML5 fetch API

I am using HTML5 fetch API. var request = new Request('https://davidwalsh.name/demo/arsenal.json'); fetch(request).then(function(response) { // Convert to JSON return response.json(); }).then(function(j) { // Yay, `j` is a JavaScript object console.log(JSON.stringify(…

Read More
Hyphen, underscore, or camelCase as word delimiter in URIs?

I'm designing an HTTP-based API for an intranet app. I realize it's a pretty small concern in the grand scheme of things, but: should I use hyphens, underscores, or camelCase to delimit words in the URIs? Here are my initial …

Read More