[Mediawiki-api] What means exactly the index parameter in this API search query? It's not what I guess or there is a bug.

[soulchainer]

Hi to all.

I'm trying to do an exercise from FreeCodeCamp 
(http://freecodecamp.com/challenges/zipline-build-a-wikipedia-viewer) and I'm 
using, for now, this query (link to the API Sandbox): 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ApiSandbox#action=query=search=json=lepidoptera=0=snippet|titlesnippet=search=lepidoptera

I get something like this:

... 
"query": {"pages": {"53307": {"pageid": 
53307,"ns": 0,"title": "Lepidoptera", 
"index": 1},"31500598": {
"pageid": 31500598,"ns": 0,"title": "List of 
Lepidoptera of Metropolitan France","index": 2},  
   "8279262": {"pageid": 8279262,
"ns": 0,"title": "List of Lepidoptera that feed on Ipomoea",  
   "index": 10},...},..., 
"search": [{"ns": 0,
"title": "Lepidoptera","snippet": "The Lepidoptera 
(/\u02ccl\u025bp\u0268\u02c8d\u0252pt\u0259r\u0259/ 
lep-i-DOP-t\u0259r-\u0259) is an order of insects that includes moths and 
butterflies (both called lepidopterans). 180,000 species",
"titlesnippet": "Lepidoptera"
},{"ns": 0,"title": "List of 
Lepidoptera of Metropolitan France","snippet": "Lepidoptera of France consist of both the 
butterflies and moths recorded from Metropolitan France. According to a 
recent estimate, there are a total of","titlesnippet": "List 
of Lepidoptera of Metropolitan France" 
},{"ns": 0,"title": 
"Macroglossinae (Lepidoptera)","snippet": "The Macroglossinae 
are a sub-family of Sphingidae moths in the order Lepidoptera. The subfamily is divided into three 
tribes: Dilophonotini, Macroglossini","titlesnippet": 
"Macroglossinae (Lepidoptera)"
},...]
 ...

Well... My doubt is: what thing exactly refers to the «index» parameter in 
«pages» objects? At first instance, I believed it was the index of the same 
page in the «search» array of objects. That seems logic. But, when using 
that, sometimes certain indexes simply don't match (they pair «pageid» from 
one page with «titlesnippet», «snippet», etc from another page). So, I don't 
know if that «index» parameter is, in fact, about some other thing or if, 
instead, there is a bug/problem with the API in this matter. And, of course, 
I know that array index order starts at 0. And already searched about this in 
the wiki, and found nothing.

If anybody can enlighten me about this, I will be very grateful :). Thanks in 
advance for reading me :).
And also my apologies in advance, just in case I commited some mistake here: 
this is my first time writing to a mailing list.
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Re: [Mediawiki-api] What means exactly the index parameter in this API search query? It's not what I guess or there is a bug.

[Brad Jorsch (Anomie)]

On Thu, Oct 8, 2015 at 6:42 AM,  wrote:

> Well... My doubt is: what thing exactly refers to the «index» parameter in
> «pages» objects? At first instance, I believed it was the index of the same
> page in the «search» array of objects. That seems logic.
>

That's close. It's the order that the pages were returned in by
generator=search.


> But, when using that, sometimes certain indexes simply don't match (they
> pair «pageid» from one page with «titlesnippet», «snippet», etc from
> another page).
>

You may notice that submitting the same list=search query will sometimes
give different results, i.e. the search engine ordering of results isn't
completely deterministic. When you see such a mismatch between the indexes
in the pages produces by generator=search and the list produced by
list=search, the same thing happened between the two searches.


-- 
Brad Jorsch (Anomie)
Senior Software Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation
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