On Saturday 21 March 2009 16:15:54 Platonides wrote:
> Jeffrey Barish wrote:
> > I am writing a PyGTK application.  I would like to be able to download
> > text only (with formatting) from Wikipedia and display it in my
> > application.  I think that I am close to a solution, but I have reached
> > an impasse due to my ignorance of most of the mediawiki API.
> >
> > My plan has been to use GtkMozembed in my application to render the page,
> > so I need to retrieve html.  What is close to working is to use the
> > index.php API with action=render and title=<search string for the
> > Wikipedia page>.  The data that I retrieve does display in my browser,
> > but it has the following undesired characteristics:
> >
> >
> > 2. There are sections at the end that I don't want (Further reading,
> > External links, Notes, See also, References).
>
> Those sections are part of the content. The API doesn't have any
> parameter to include/exclude them.
>
> > 1. All images appear (I want none).
>
> Same issue. Although it's easier to replace, remove /<img.*?>/

It seems that images appear in <div class="thumbcaption"></div> blocks.  Would 
you advise using regular expressions to remove these blocks, or should I use 
something like BeautifulSoup to parse the page formally and then remove 
elements?

> > 3. Some characters are not rendered correctly (e.g., IPA: [ˈvɔlfgaŋ
> > amaˈdeus ˈmoːtsart]).
>
> You're showing the text as windows-1252, but it is UTF-8.

It seems that the html lacks the meta field that specifies the character 
encoding.  The original page does not, of course.  Is there a parameter that 
causes action=render to include the metadata?  Am I using the wrong action?  
Can I safely assume that all Wikipedia pages use UTF-8?
-- 
Jeffrey Barish

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