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:
1. All images appear (I want none).
2. There are sections at the end that I don't want (Further reading, External
links, Notes, See also, References).
3. Some characters are not rendered correctly (e.g., IPA: [ˈvɔlfgaŋ
amaˈdeus ˈmoËtsart]).
To fix 1 and 2, I could perhaps use an html parser and delete the offending
items, but I wonder whether there is a proper solution using the mediawiki
API (such as a prop parameter with which I could at least specify that I
don't want any images).
I assume that 3 is a unicode problem, but I don't know what to do to fix it.
--
Jeffrey Barish