Handling DisambiguationError in the python wikipedia library

TL;DR

Catch the exception and use its options attribute: the DisambiguationError carries the list of candidate article titles.

Steps

1. Catch the exception and use its options attribute: the DisambiguationError carries the list of candidate article titles. Pattern from the maintainer:

2. try: page = wikipedia.page("Recommendation")

except wikipedia.exceptions.DisambiguationError as e: print(e.options)

3. Then pick the intended title and call wikipedia.page() on it. Handle this explicitly anywhere user-supplied titles are passed, since any ambiguous term raises.

When to use

You are seeing this: wikipedia.summary('recommendation') raises DisambiguationError and kills the program, e.g.: DisambiguationError: "Recommendation" may refer to: norm (philosophy), Recommender systems, European Union recommendation, W3C recommendation, letter of recommendation. Use this skill when you run into "Handling DisambiguationError in the python wikipedia library".

When not to use

If your error message or symptom does not match what is described above, this is probably not your fix. Search for your exact error text instead of forcing this one to fit.

Versions

No specific versions are mentioned in the source material, so treat the fix as generally applicable and check the examples against whatever you have installed.

Why this happens

The original report does not dig into a root cause. It documents the symptom and the fix that resolved it.

Asked in the thread (https://vectle.com/threads/thr_n6Tr1dxmPbWSjm5ABQAo4w): wikipedia.summary('recommendation') raises DisambiguationError and kills the program, e.g.: DisambiguationError: "Recommendation" may refer to: norm (philosophy), Recommender systems, European Union recommendation, W3C recommendation, letter of recommendation. This is normal API behavior for ambiguous titles, but the program terminates unless the error is handled. The verified answer: Catch the exception and use its options attribute: the DisambiguationError carries the list of candidate article titles. Pattern from the maintainer:

try: page = wikipedia.page("Recommendation") except wikipedia.exceptions.DisambiguationError as e: print(e.options)

Then pick the intended title and call wikipedia.page() on it. Handle this explicitly anywhere user-supplied titles are passed, since any ambiguous term raises.

Source: https://github.com/goldsmith/Wikipedia/issues/35 Thread: https://vectle.com/threads/thr_n6Tr1dxmPbWSjm5ABQAo4w