Question

Possible Duplicate:
Getting content using wikipedia API
Using PHP, how do I get the first paragraph of a Wikipedia article with the MediaWiki API?

This is mainly an XML-related question.

I’m trying to do this using the MediaWiki API.

I’ve managed to get a response in XML format (can change to JSON if easier), and I see all the content I need in the response. Example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?format=xml&action=query&titles=War%20and%20Peace&prop=revisions&rvprop=content&format=xmlfm

I used xmlfm here for formatting reasons. In PHP I’m doing:

$request = "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?format=xml&action=query&titles=War%20and%20Peace&prop=revisions&rvprop=content&format=xml";

$response = @file_get_contents($request);

$wxml = simplexml_load_string($response);

var_dump($wxml);

Which prints out everything in the XML. My question is, how do I get the first paragraph out of this?

I can parse it from the full article, so basically what I’m asking is, how do I get the article text from this XML? Of course, if there’s a way to go for the first paragraph directly, that would be best.

Answer 1

I’d definitely say you’re looking for this.

If you want to retrieve everything in the first section (not just the first paragraph):

// action=parse: get parsed text
// page=Baseball: from the page Baseball
// format=json: in json format
// prop=text: send the text content of the article
// section=0: top content of the page

$url = 'http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=parse&page=Baseball&format=json&prop=text&section=0';
$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "TestScript"); // required by wikipedia.org server; use YOUR user agent with YOUR contact information. (otherwise your IP might get blocked)
$c = curl_exec($ch);

$json = json_decode($c);

$content = $json->{'parse'}->{'text'}->{'*'}; // get the main text content of the query (it's parsed HTML)

// pattern for first match of a paragraph
$pattern = '#<p>(.*?)</p>#s'; // http://www.phpbuilder.com/board/showthread.php?t=10352690
if(preg_match_all($pattern, $content, $matches))
{
    // print $matches[0]; // content of the first paragraph (including wrapping <p> tag)
    print strip_tags(implode("\n\n",$matches[1])); // Content of the first paragraph without the HTML tags.
}