Python: Check if Wikipedia Article Exists

Question

I'm trying to figure out how to check if a Wikipedia article exists. For example,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food

exists, however

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fod 

does not, and the page simply says, "Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name."

Thanks!

Answer 1

>>> import urllib
>>> print urllib.urlopen("https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food").getcode()
200
>>> print urllib.urlopen("https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fod").getcode()
404

is it ok?

or

>>> a = urllib.urlopen("https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fod").getcode()
>>> if a == 404:
...     print "Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name."
...
Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name.

Answer 2

Basicly, most website or web service will announce some status from each your HTTP request in the HTTP response header.
In your case, you can simply find the status code if is 404 while the article is not existed even though your brower rendered a page like a normol result.

import request
result = request.get('https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food')
if result.status_code == 200:  # the article exists
    pass  # blablabla