There's an inconsistency in the handling of multi-value parameters where if
you pass a value consisting of only whitespace[1] it will be interpreted as
an empty set rather than as a single value consisting of whitespace. For
example,
https://www.mediawiki.org/w/api.php?action=query&titles= correctly
handles the query as specifying no titles, but
https://www.mediawiki.org/w/api.php?action=query&titles=%20 is also treated
as specifying no titles rather than specifying a title consisting of a
space character.
With Gerrit change 405609,[2] the behavior will be changed so that the
latter query will behave more like
https://www.mediawiki.org/w/api.php?action=query&titles=_ in reporting that
the supplied title is invalid. The plan is that this will be deployed to
WMF wikis with 1.31.0-wmf.20 on February 6–8, see
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.31/Roadmap for the schedule.
Passing an empty string as the value of a multi-valued parameter will
continue to be treated as a set of zero elements rather than a one-element
set containing the empty string.
Most clients should handle this change without major issue, as the
resulting response is consistent with the response when any other invalid
title is submitted. Clients that want to continue treating whitespace-only
input as no input should begin checking for whitespace-only input before
submitting it to the API.
[1]: Specifically: spaces (U+0020), tabs (U+0009), line feeds (U+000A), and
carriage returns (U+000D).
[2]:
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/405609/
--
Brad Jorsch (Anomie)
Senior Software Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation
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