Get WMS version from QGIS layer in Python

Question

I need to retrieve the WMS version from a QGIS layer in Python. I can see the version in amongst the metadata(), but is there a better way than having to parse all of that HTML for one little value?

Answer 1

Bit of a hacky way but you can avoid using BeautifulSoup by splitting the metadata (which is printed as a looong string) at "WMS Version" and print off the next few characters which represents the version:

layer = iface.activeLayer()
string = "<tr><td>WMS Version</td><td>"
layer.metadata().split(string)[1][:5]

Which for my WMS layer prints:

u'1.3.0'

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Edit:

If you want to isolate it more accurately by extracting only the version number <td>version_number</td> then I would suggest using regular expressions:

import re

layer = iface.activeLayer()
string = "<tr><td>WMS Version</td><td>(.+?)</td>"

result = re.search(string, layer.metadata())
if result:
    wms_version = result.group(1)

print wms_version

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Second edit:

As @Tom Chadwin found out to his problem in regards to translating the WMS version from another language, replacing "WMS Version" with QCoreApplication.translate("QgsWmsProvider", "WMS Version") seems to have worked. So the edited code would be:

import re

layer = iface.activeLayer()
string = "<tr><td>" + QCoreApplication.translate("QgsWmsProvider", "WMS Version") + "</td><td>(.+?)</td>"

result = re.search(string, layer.metadata())
if result:
    wms_version = result.group(1)

print wms_version