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Special Export tool

The Special Export tool fetches specific pages with their raw content (wikitext) in real-time, without needing to download the entire dataset. The content is provided in XML format.

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Using the Special Export Tool

You can actually use Special Export to retrieve pages from any Wiki site. On the German Wiktionary, however, the tool is labelled Spezial:Exportieren, but it works the same way.

Examples

Exporting Pages from Any Wiki Site

To access the XML content of the page titled "Austria" from English Wikipedia, you can use the following Python code. When you press run, it will open the export link in your default browser:

Editor (session: webbrowser) Run 
import webbrowser

title = 'Austria'
domain = 'en.wikipedia.org'
url = f'https://{domain}/wiki/Special:Export/{title}'
webbrowser.open_new_tab(url)
Output Clear

Exporting Pages from the German Wiktionary

For the German Wiktionary, the export tool uses Spezial:Exportieren instead of Special:Export. You can use similar Python code to open the export link for the page titled "schön" (German for "beautiful"):

Editor (session: webbrowser) Run 
title = 'schön'
domain = 'de.wiktionary.org'
url = f'https://{domain}/wiki/Spezial:Exportieren/{title}'
webbrowser.open_new_tab(url)
Output Clear

Using the requests Library

To programmatically fetch and download XML content, you can use Python's requests library. This example shows how to build the URL, make a request, and get the XML content of a Wiktionary page by its title.

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import requests

def fetch(title):
    # Construct the URL for the XML export of the given page title
    url = f'https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Spezial:Exportieren/{title}'

    # Send a GET request
    resp = requests.get(url)

    # Check if the request was successful, and raise an error if not
    resp.raise_for_status()

    # Return the XML content of the requested page
    return resp.content

Next, let us attempt to retrieve the XML content for the page titled "hoch" and print the initial 500 bytes for a glimpse of the XML content displayed in the Result tab.

Python
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page = fetch('hoch')
print(page[:500])
Python Console Session
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b'<mediawiki xmlns="http://www.mediawiki.org/xml/export-0.11/" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.mediawiki.org/xml/export-0.11/ http://www.mediawiki.org/xml/export-0.11.xsd" version="0.11" xml:lang="de">\n  <siteinfo>\n    <sitename>Wiktionary</sitename>\n    <dbname>dewiktionary</dbname>\n    <base>https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Hauptseite</base>\n    <generator>MediaWiki 1.44.0-wmf.4</generator>\n    <case>case-sensitive</case>\n    <namespa'

We will continue to use the fetch function throughout this tutorial.