calling a function within itself

Question

As part of my quest to learn Python, I'm writing a wrapper over the MediaWiki API to return article texts.

Here's the function to search for an article:

def article_search(self, search_terms):
    url = self.article_url % (self.language, search_terms)
    response = requests.get(url)
    tree = html.fromstring(response.text)

    results = tree.xpath('//rev[@contentmodel='wikitext']/text()')
    test_redirect = re.search('\#REDIRECT', str(results))

    if test_redirect:
        redirect = re.search(r'\[\[([A-Za-z0-9_]+)\]\]', str(results))
        go_to = redirect.group(1)
        article_search(go_to)

    else:
        return results

The goal of the if-else block is to check to see if the search result actually is trying to redirect us to another page (if test_redirect) and then search for the page that we're being redirected to with article_search(go_to). When I run the code on a page that I know doesn't redirect, it works fine. However, when I run it over a page that does have a redirect, I get NameError: global name 'article_search' is not defined. I get the feeling this is probably a newbie question, but I'm not really sure what I'm doing wrong. Any help?

Answer 1

I assume that article_search is part of a class (since you use self). In that case you should call it like that:

self.article_search(go_to)

(assuming it is not a weird staticmethod but a method of an instance)