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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-14T04:01:48+00:00

I’ve been up and down the Wikipedia API , but I can’t figure out

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I’ve been up and down the Wikipedia API, but I can’t figure out if there’s a nice way to fetch the excerpt of an article (usually the first paragraph). It would be nice to get the HTML formatting of that paragraph, too.

The only way I currently see of getting something that resembles a snippet is by performing a fulltext search (example), but that’s not really what I want (too short).

Is there any other way to fetch the first paragraph of a Wikipedia article than barbarically parsing HTML/WikiText?

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  1. Editorial Team

    I found no way of doing this through the API, so I resorted to parsing HTML, using PHP’s DOM functions. This was pretty easy, something among the lines of:

    $doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML($wikiPage);
$xpath = new DOMXpath($doc);
$nlPNodes = $xpath->query('//div[@id="bodyContent"]/p');
$nFirstP = $nlPNodes->item(0);
$sFirstP = $doc->saveXML($nFirstP);
echo $sFirstP; // echo the first paragraph of the wiki article, including <p></p>
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