Wikipedia with json - php

Question

<?php
include 'index.php';
if (#$_GET['search']) {
$url = "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?format=json&action=query&prop=extracts&titles=".ucwords($_GET['search'])."&redirects=true";
$url = str_replace('', '%20', $url);
if ($data = json_decode(#file_get_contents($url)))
{
foreach ($data->query->pages as $key => $value) {
$pageID = $key;
break;
}
$content = $data->query->pages->$pageID->extract;
echo $content;
}
}
?>
I have code above about getting contents of wikipedia search result. But the problem is that if I enter wrong keyword like "makasia" instead of "malaysia", its not showing the related results or anything, giving an error
"Undefined property: stdClass::$extract"

Answer 1

Your problem is that even when the search fails, the website returns valid JSON, so the call to json_decode returns an object (which in a boolean context is truthy), which results in you executing the code in your if statement, giving you the error you are seeing. Thanks to #Tgr for providing an API reference which indicates what the return data looks like when the page is missing, this code should do what you want:
if (#$_GET['search']) {
$url = "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?format=json&action=query&prop=extracts&titles=".ucwords($_GET['search'])."&redirects=true";
$url = str_replace(' ', '%20', $url);
$data = json_decode(file_get_contents($url));
$found_data = false;
foreach ($data->query->pages as $page) {
if (property_exists($page, 'missing')) continue;
$found_data = true;
$content = $page->extract;
echo $content;
}
if (!$found_data) {
echo "No data for {$_GET['search']} found!";
}
}