Jools Smyth schreef:

I'm having some problems which are caused by some inconsistent formatting of results from the API in format JSON. This is making problems for a perl module I made.

Take this example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=categorymembers&...

results are returned in an array and so are easy to loop through. This is how most of the results are formatted from the "list" query types.

now take this one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=backlinks&bltitl...

the results are not in an array but a hashref of hashrefs with the pageid being the key (and the page id is also in the hashref too)

Is this a bug, or could this be changed so that the api returns results in a consistent manner (as with the XML).

I don't really see the problem here: most languages have some sort of construct to loop through hashrefs. You're right that there's an inconsistency, though. I'll investigate which format (list or hashref with pageid keys) is more common and use that throughout.

Roan Kattouw (Catrope)