Wget recognizes some part of my URL address as a syntax error

Question

I am quite new with wget and I have done my research on Google but I found no clue.

I need to save a single HTML file of a webpage:

wget yahoo.com -O test.html

and it works, but, when I try to be more specific:

wget http://search.yahoo.com/404handler?src=search&p=food+delicious -O test.html

here comes the problem, wget recognizes &p=food+delicious as a syntax, it says: 'p' is not recognized as an internal or external command

How can I solve this problem? I really appreciate your suggestions.

Hitandrun

what u want to do? whats the purpose? – Lungki

i want a search engine to count how many hits does my keyword have, so i simply make a URL that contains my keyword in it, but the problem comes as wget recognize soome part of my URL address as a syntax error – Hitandrun

Answer 1

The & has a special meaning in the shell. Escape it with \ or put the url in quotes to avoid this problem.

wget http://search.yahoo.com/404handler?src=search\&p=food+delicious -O test.html

or

wget "http://search.yahoo.com/404handler?src=search&p=food+delicious" -O test.html

In many Unix shells, putting an & after a command causes it to be executed in the background.

Poppo

To clarify, this has nothing to do with wget. The special meaning of & is interpreted (by bash, sh, or whatever) before it gets to wget. – Poi

actually i am running wget on windows, and i have tried your suggestions, but none of the works, when i tried this : wget search.yahoo.com/404handler?src=search\&p=food+delicious -O test.html it gives the same error message, when i tried this: wget "search.yahoo.com/404handler?src=search&p=food+delicious" -O test.html it goes: error 404: Not Found – Hitandrun

The 404 you get is a problem with the url (notice the /404handler?... part?) . http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=food+delicious seems to work better, but you should really research how interaction with Yahoo search should be scripted. – Poppo

Single quotes did not work for me but scape the & with \ made the affair for me – Aiaia

the second option is awesome :D – Saldana

Answer 2

Wrap your URL in single quotes to avoid this issue.

i.e.

wget 'http://search.yahoo.com/404handler?src=search&p=food+delicious' -O test.html

Olethea

i have tried your suggestion but it doesn't work, it goes: 'error 404: Not found' – Hitandrun

Answer 3

if you are using a jubyter notebook, maybe check if you have downloaded

pip install wget 

before warping from URL

Allman