Question

I’m working on some code that retrieves a section of a Wikipedia page as an NSString. I’ve found a constructed link online that returns the raw data of a section. For instance, to get the first section of the Wikipedia page on ‘Boston’, you would go to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Boston&action=raw&section=0.

And what I’m trying to achieve, is to convert that raw data into what can be seen on the normal Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston.

Now, at first, I thought I’d use regular expressions to parse out blocks that start with {{ and end with }}. However, this proved to be problematic, and it deleted necessary text.

Then, I thought I could somehow find a wiki markup to html converter (present everywhere online) for Objective-C, but I had no luck there.

There are several similar questions on SO, but none of them seem to be clearly resolved: Getting Wikipedia Article Summary using NSScanner Problem.

So, to resume, does anyone know how to parse a wiki page into an NSString?

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

Use a PEG WikiText parser such as kiwi: https://github.com/AboutUs/kiwi

You can find kiwi’s parsing output rules here: https://github.com/AboutUs/kiwi/blob/master/src/syntax.leg

You will need to download peg/leg to compile the leg file: http://piumarta.com/software/peg/