Mediawiki search and replace automation in python
As part of my translator work for Fedora I noticed a page with a stylistic issue with an Italian word, obbiettivo which is better spelled as obiettivo . Now, I quickly edited the page and the few other found by searching for the term, then realized there were a lot more with the plural form, so it was not practical to do the work manually.
Fortunately, Mediawiki (the program powering Fedora s wiki) has a very good API, which is accessible with python; in particular in Fedora we ship python-mwclient and it turned out I could search and replace all occurrences in 10 lines of code. Magic!
If someone is wondering, here is the script I used:
#!/usr/bin/python
# Wiki Search And Replace
import mwclient, re
site = mwclient.Site( fedoraproject.org )
site.login( login , password )
pages = site.search( obbiettivi , what= text )
for pagedata in pages:
page = site.Pages[ pagedata['title'] ]
text = page.edit()
newtext = re.sub( r'([o|O])bbiettivi', r'1biettivi' , text )
page.save( newtext, summary='Obbiettivo->Obiettivo', minor=True)
I found the mwclient documentation a bit lacking so the hard part was figuring out the value for some parameters in the function calls. At the end, I mostly relied on the help(mwclient) content, available from the python interpreter, in conjunction with the Mediawiki API reference you get by pointing the browser to http://fedoraproject.org/w/api.php
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All’inizio del mese scorso avevo presentato 
