API:Data formats

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  and. 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: In the output, timestamps are always in ISO 8601 format.
 * ISO 8601 format:
 * MediaWiki's internal timestamp format:
 * MySQL's internal timestamp format
 * UNIX timestamp format  (number of seconds since January 1, 1970)

Output
MediaWiki API supports a number of generic output formats (XML, JSON, YAML, ...), and some domain specific formats (RSS, ...) for special modules. Starting with version 1.24, all formats other than JSON, XML and PHP are deprecated and are scheduled for removal in 1.26 and 1.27. All new API users should use JSON. Clients written in PHP should avoid using the PHP format because it is fundamentally insecure. It is maintained only due to its popularity.

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.

CSV format can easily be derived from json responses using a converter such as json-csv.com.

JSON parameters
Unlike the other formats, the two JSON formats can take the following additional parameters:

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, won't work unless anonymous users are allowed to use them

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