Author: bburette
Description:
Hi,
I recently noticed that the API for Wikipedia adds [[U+FFFD]] (they eventually show up like question marks in a little diamond) at the end of all strings returned by the following API request:
My bot bumped on this on <i>en.wikipedia.org</i> and was unable to get the interwiki list from the site.
Strangely enough this seems to happen only here as other Wikipedia wikis don't exhibit this behaviour. A few examples:
- http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&meta=siteinfo&siprop=interwikimap
- http://pt.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&meta=siteinfo&siprop=interwikimap
- http://zh.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&meta=siteinfo&siprop=interwikimap
My guess is that the database table “interwiki” contains extra characters after each field, on my MediaWiki server this is what I see:
mysql> desc interwiki ;
+-----------+---------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| Field | Type | Null | Key | Default | Extra |
+-----------+---------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| iw_prefix | varbinary(32) | NO | PRI | NULL | |
| iw_url | blob | NO | NULL | ||
| iw_local | tinyint(1) | NO | NULL | ||
| iw_url | tinyint(1) | NO | NULL | ||
+-----------+---------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
you can confirm that all “prefix” fields in the XML returned by <i>en.wikipedia.org</i> are exactly 32 characters long so the var in varbinary() is not used or the code reading that field has a problem.
Thank, Regards,
Version: unspecified
Severity: major