how to find out if string is in the dictionary

Question

I want to know if a word is in the dictionary.

Here is what I am trying.

import requests

def word_in_dictionary(word):
    response = requests.get('https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/'+word)
    return response.status_code==200

print(word_in_dictionary('potato')) # True
print(word_in_dictionary('nobblebog')) # False

But unfortunately the dictionary contains a lot of words that are not English and I don't want to match those.

print(word_in_dictionary('bardzo')) # WANT THIS TO BE FALSE

So I tried to look in the content.

def word_in_dictionary(word):
    response = requests.get('https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/'+word)
    return response.status_code==200 and 'English' in response.content.decode()

But I am still getting True. It is finding "English" somewhere in the page source even though the rendered page doesn't have it (nothing when I search with ctrl-F in the browser).

How can I make it only return True if it is actually listed as having a meaning in English?

Answer 1

Looking at the HTML code, if the word is english, there's tag with id="English". You can try this code:

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup


def word_in_dictionary(word):
    response = requests.get('https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/'+word)
    return response.status_code==200 and bool(BeautifulSoup(response.content, 'html.parser').select_one('#English'))

print(word_in_dictionary('potato')) # True
print(word_in_dictionary('nobblebog')) # False
print(word_in_dictionary('bardzo')) # False