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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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Importing Packages

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import requests # to fetch info from URLs

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.

Exporting Pages from Any Wiki Site

To access the XML content of the page titled "Austria" from English Wikipedia, you can construct your URL as follows.

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title = 'Austria'
domain = 'en.wikipedia.org'
url = f'https://{domain}/wiki/Special:Export/{title}'
print(url)
Python Console Session
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Export/Austria

Exporting Pages from the German Wiktionary

For the German Wiktionary, the export tool uses Spezial:Exportieren instead of Special:Export.

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title = 'hoch'
domain = 'de.wiktionary.org'
url = f'https://{domain}/wiki/Spezial:Exportieren/{title}'
print(url)
Python Console Session
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https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Spezial:Exportieren/hoch

Fetching XML Data with requests

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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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.text

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.

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page = fetch('hoch')
print(page[:500])
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<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">
  <siteinfo>
    <sitename>Wiktionary</sitename>
    <dbname>dewiktionary</dbname>
    <base>https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Hauptseite</base>
    <generator>MediaWiki 1.44.0-wmf.17</generator>
    <case>case-sensitive</case>
    <namesp

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