Home/ Questions/Q 7909633
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-03T12:30:37+00:00

I have a question regarding parsing data from Wikipedia for my Android app. I

  • 0

I have a question regarding parsing data from Wikipedia for my Android app. I have a script that can download the XML by reading the source from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=parse&prop=text&format=xml&page=ARTICLE_NAME (and also the JSON by replacing format=xml with format=json.

But what I can’t figure out is how to only access certain sections from the table of contents. What I want is when the page is loaded, the user can press a button that makes a pop-up appear that displays the headers from the table of contents and allow the user to read that piece and only that piece of it for convenience. I’m a little shaky with JSON but is it possible to do this? Or, is there an API from Wikipedia that allows the developer to only view certain parts of a page?

Thanks!

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Unfortunatelly, it seems the mediawiki.org documentation for parse doesn’t tell you how to do this. But the documentation in the API itself does: You can use section parameter. And you can use prop=sections to get the list of sections.

    So, you could first use:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?format=xml&action=parse&page=Android_%28operating_system%29&prop=sections

    to get the list of sections and then

    http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?format=xml&action=parse&page=Android_%28operating_system%29&prop=text&section=26

    to get the HTML for a certain section.

    • 0