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REFERENCE.md

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This file is intended to be a reference to mwclient. The current version is mwclient 0.6.5.

The mwclient framework provides access to the MediaWiki API. It provides the functions of the MediaWiki API in a Pythonic manner.

Sites

The Site object is the most important class. It represents a MediaWiki site. Its constructor accepts various arguments, of which the first two, host and path, are the most important. They represent respectively the hostname without protocol and the root directory where api.php is located. The path parameter should end with a slash, /. Protocols other than HTTP and HTTPS are currently not supported.

#http
site = mwclient.Site(host, path = '/w/', ...)

#https
site = mwclient.Site(('https', host), path = '/w/', ...)

Pages

Sites provide access to pages via various generators and the Pages object. The base Page object is called Page and from that derive Category and Image. When the page is retrieved via Site.Pages or a generator, it will check automatically which of those three specific types should be returned. To get a page by its name, call Site.Pages as a scriptable object:

page = site.Pages['Template:Stub']
image = site.Pages['Image:Wiki.png'] # This will return an Image object
image2 = site.Images['Wiki.png'] # The same image

Alternatively, Site.Images and Site.Categories are provided, which do exactly the same as Site.Pages, except that they require the page name without its namespace prefixed.

PageProperties

The Page object provides many generators available in the API. In addition to the page properties listed in the API documentation, also the lists backlinks and embedded in are members of the Page object. For more information about using generators see the section on generators below.

Category objects provide an extra function, members to list all members of a category. The Category object can also be used itself as an iterator yielding all its members.

#list pages in Category:Help by name
category = site.Pages['Category:Help']
for page in category:
	print page.name

Image objects have additional functions imagehistory and imageusage which represent the old versions of the image and its usage, respectively. Image.download returns a file object to the full size image.

fr = image.download()
fw = open('Wiki.png', 'rb')
while True:
	s = fr.read(4096)
	if not s: break
	fw.write(s)
fr.close() # Always close those file objects !!!
fw.close()

Editing pages

Call Page.text() to retrieve the page content. Use Page.save(text, summary = u'', ...) to save the page. If available, Page.save uses the API to edit, but falls back to the old way if the write API is not available.

Generators

Exceptions

Implementation notes

Most properties and generators accept the same parameters as the API, without their two-letter prefix. Exceptions:

  • Image.imageinfo is the imageinfo of the latest image. Earlier versions can be fetched using imagehistory()
  • Site.all*: parameter (ap)from renamed to start
  • categorymembers is implemented as Category.members
  • deletedrevs is deletedrevisions
  • usercontribs is usercontributions
  • First parameters of search and usercontributions are search and user, respectively

Properties and generators are implemented as Python generators. Their limit parameter is only an indication of the number of items in one chunk. It is not the total limit. Doing list(generator(limit = limit)) will return ALL items of generator, and not be limited by the limit value. Use list(generator(max_items = max_items)) to limit the amount of items returned. Default chunk size is generally the maximum chunk size.

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