On 16/10/2007, Platonides <Platonides(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Mike McGrath wrote:
I'd like to write a script that checks a few
pages on my mediawiki
install remotely. Probably using urlgrabber. Whats the most efficient
way to determine if a page exists besides just grabbing the page?
-Mike
You could ask Special:Export for all pages at once which avoids querying
each one.
If you want to avoid querying page you already have, you can check its
properties before on api.php
Of course, if you're querying multiple pages, then a far more
efficient method is to do a batch check; this would be a very handy
API module to have in core for multiple uses, not least of all
interwiki existence checking[*], and would essentially be a simple
wrapper around a LinkBatch operation.
* = though for Wikimedia sites, we'd probably want the option to query
the database directly
In my case the pages are more codes, there will be thousands of codes,
only a few being checked at a time so an api would be handy.
-Mike