Question

I have trouble understanding wikipedia API.

I have isolated a link, by processing json that I got as a response after sending a request to http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php

Assuming that I got the following link, how do I get access to information like date of birth, etc.

I’m using python. I tried doing a

import urllib2,simplejson
search_req = urllib2.Request(direct_url_to_required_wikipedia_page)
response = urllib2.urlopen(search_req)

I have tried reading the api. But, I can’t figure out how to extract data from specific pages.

Answer 1

Try:

import urllib
import urllib2
import simplejson

url = 'http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php'
values = {'action' : 'query',
          'prop' : 'revisions',
          'titles' : 'Jennifer_Aniston',
          'rvprop' : 'content',
          'format' : 'json'}

data = urllib.urlencode(values)
req = urllib2.Request(url, data)
response = urllib2.urlopen(req)
json = response.read()

Variable json is the json of the wikipedia page. You can now parse it with simplejson or whatever…