Question

Is there a direct API call where I can get titles from a wikipedia page.

For e.g. from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago, I want to retrieve the following:

1 History
 1.1 Rapid growth and development
 1.2 20th and 21st centuries
2 Geography
 2.1 Topography
 2.2 Climate
3 Cityscape
 3.1 Architecture
so on ———–

I have looked at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Lists/All, but couldn’t find an action which gives me above list from a wiki page.

Answer 1

What you want is not a list of pages, so it’s not on the page you linked to. But it is possible to retrieve the list of section titles of some page. To do that, you use action=parse with prop=sections.

For example, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?format=xml&action=parse&prop=sections&page=Chicago returns

<api>
    <parse title="Chicago">
        <sections>
            <s toclevel="1" level="2" line="History" number="1" index="1" fromtitle="Chicago" byteoffset="8123" anchor="History"/>
            <s toclevel="2" level="3" line="Rapid growth and development" number="1.1" index="2" fromtitle="Chicago" byteoffset="12922" anchor="Rapid_growth_and_development"/>
            <s toclevel="2" level="3" line="20th and 21st centuries" number="1.2" index="3" fromtitle="Chicago" byteoffset="21558" anchor="20th_and_21st_centuries"/>
            <s toclevel="1" level="2" line="Geography" number="2" index="4" fromtitle="Chicago" byteoffset="28176" anchor="Geography"/>
            …