API:Data formats

This page is part of the MediaWiki API documentation.

MediaWiki API

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Input

The API takes its input through parameters provided by the query string or from a POST entity in application/x-www-form-urlencoded or multipart/form-data format. Every module (and every action=query submodule) has its own set of parameters, which is listed in the documentation and in action=help, and can be retrieved through action=paraminfo.

Multivalue parameters

Some parameters take multiple values, separated by a pipe character (|). Whether a parameter accepts multiple values is listed explicitly in action=paraminfo and action=help. The documentation does not distinguish multivalue parameters explicitly, but the descriptions for these parameters are usually along the lines of "A list of ..." or "A pipe-separated list of ...".

Timestamps

Parameters that take timestamp values accept multiple timestamp formats:

• ISO 8601 format: 2008-08-23T18:05:46Z
• MediaWiki's internal timestamp format: 20080823180546
• MySQL's internal timestamp format 2008-08-23 18:05:46
• UNIX timestamp format 1219514746 (number of seconds since January 1, 1970)

In the output, timestamps are always in ISO 8601 format.

Output

MediaWiki API supports a number of generic output formats (XML, JSON, YAML, ...), and some domain specific formats (RSS, ...) for special modules.

Unless specified, all modules allow data output in all generic formats. To simplify debugging, all generic formats have "pretty-print in HTML" alternatives with 'fm' suffix. By default, xmlfm format is used.

Note that while the pretty-print formats are all indented and separate syntactic elements with newlines, the non-pretty formats don't do this.

Code	Description	Parameters
json	JSON format	callback (opt): Wraps the output into a given function call
php	serialized PHP format
wddx	WDDX format
xml	XML format
yaml	YAML format
rawfm	JSON format with the debugging elements (HTML)	callback (opt): Wraps the output into a given function call
txt	PHP print_r() format
dbg	PHP var_export() format
dump	PHP var_dump() format

JSON callback restrictions

When using JSON in callback mode, a number of things are disabled for security:

• Tokens cannot be obtained (so state-changing actions aren't possible)
• The client is treated as an anonymous user (i.e. not logged in) for all purposes, even after logging in through action=login
  • This means that things that require additional rights, such as rcprop=patrolled, won't work unless anonymous users are allowed to use them

Examples

XML

api.php?action=query&titles=Albert%20Einstein&prop=info&format=xmlfm

JSON/YAML

api.php?action=query&titles=Albert%20Einstein&prop=info&format=jsonfm

it may be useful to add the '&indexpageids' parameter, to parse the json if the pageid ("736") is not known before the result.

WDDX

api.php?action=query&titles=Albert%20Einstein&prop=info&format=wddxfm

PHP (serialized format, with line breaks added for readability. Use PHP's unserialize() function to recover data.)

api.php?action=query&titles=Albert%20Einstein&prop=info&format=php

PHP (var_export format. Use PHP's eval() function to recover data.)

api.php?action=query&titles=Albert%20Einstein&prop=info&format=dbg