Every person that has ever been bored on the internet and read Wikipedia articles to rid themselves of boredom has probably used their random article generator link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

Today we will use this link to write a python script that searches Wikipedia for random articles and gives you a y/n prompt to choose if you'd like to read the article or pick another random article. Since the link can not be refreshed to again search for a different article we will need to use loops.

Random Wiki Article Generator

First we will need to pip install two prerequisites, easily done as follows:

pip install beautifulsoup4
pip install requests

Now to import the above installs and an additional webbrowser module

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import webbrowser

We will declare a while loop and three variable.

• url - contains the random wiki link
• soup - used to parse html content
• title - fetch firstheading value from parsed data

while True:
    url = requests.get("https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random")
    soup = BeautifulSoup(url.content, "html.parser")
    title = soup.find(class_="firstHeading").text

A print statement to prompt the user for a y/n option and an input() statement. Append the statement with the .lower() function to convert any uppercase inputs to lowercase as to avoid any incorrect inputs.

while True:
    url = requests.get("https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random")
    soup = BeautifulSoup(url.content, "html.parser")
    title = soup.find(class_="firstHeading").text

    print(f"{title} \nDo you want to read this article? (Y/N)")
    ans = input("").lower()

Write a conditional statement to perform different functionality based on user input. Execute webbrowser.open() to open a browser windows with the selected link (program will use the default browser for this purpose).

if ans == "y":
        url = "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s" % title
        webbrowser.open(url)
        break
    elif ans == "n":
        print("Don't worry. Fetching a new article for you!")
        continue
    else:
        print("Invalid Command!")
        break

Output

Thank you for reading. You can get the code here from it's GitHub repo.