Question

Using Wikiepdia API link to get some basic informations about some world known characters.

Example : (About Dave Longaberger)

This would show as following

Now my question
I’d like to parse the xml to get such basic informations between <extract></extract> to show it.

Here is my idea but failed (I/O warning : failed to load external entity)

<?PHP
$url = 'http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=extracts&titles=Dave Longaberger&format=xml&exintro=1';

$xml = simplexml_load_file($url);

// get extract
$text=$xml->pages[0]->extract;
// show title
echo $text;
?>

Another idea but also failed (failed to open stream: HTTP request failed!)

<?PHP
function get_url_contents($url){
$crl = curl_init();
$timeout = 5;
curl_setopt ($crl, CURLOPT_URL,$url);
curl_setopt ($crl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt ($crl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
$ret = curl_exec($crl);
curl_close($crl);
return $ret;
}

$url = "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=extracts&titles=Dave Longaberger&format=xml&exintro=1";

$text = file_get_contents($url);
echo $text;
?>

so any idea how to do it. ~ Thanks

Update (after added urlencode or rawurlencode still not working)

$name = "Dave Longaberger";
$name = urlencode($name);
$url = 'http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=extracts&titles='.$name.'&format=xml&exintro=1';
$text = file_get_contents($url);

Also not working

$url = 'http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=extracts&titles=Dave Longaberger&format=xml&exintro=1';
$url = urlencode($url);
$text = file_get_contents($url);

nor

$url = 'http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=extracts&titles='.rawurlencode('Dave Longaberger').'&format=xml&exintro=1';
$text = file_get_contents($url);

Well so i really don’t know looks like it is impossible by somehow.

Answer 1

Set the User Agent Header in your curl request, wikipedia replies with error 403 forbidden otherwise.

<?PHP
$url = "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=extracts&titles=Dave+Longaberger&format=xml&exintro=1";

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1");
$xml = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

echo $xml;
?>

Alternatively:

ini_set("user_agent","Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1");
$url = "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=extracts&titles=Dave+Longaberger&format=xml&exintro=1";
$xml = simplexml_load_file($url);

$extracts = $xml->xpath("/api/query/pages/page/extract");

var_dump($extracts);