How to get results from the Wikipedia API with PHP? - php

Question

I'm probably not supposed to use file_get_contents() What should I use? I'd like to keep it simple.
Warning: file_get_contents(http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&titles=Your_Highness&prop=revisions&rvprop=content&rvsection=0): failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.0 403 Forbidden

Answer 1

The problem you are running into here is related to the MW API's User-Agent policy - you must supply a User-Agent header, and that header must supply some means of contacting you.
You can do this with file_get_contents() with a stream context:
$opts = array('http' =>
array(
'user_agent' => 'MyBot/1.0 (http://www.mysite.com/)'
)
);
$context = stream_context_create($opts);
$url = 'http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&titles=Your_Highness&prop=revisions&rvprop=content&rvsection=0';
var_dump(file_get_contents($url, FALSE, $context));
Having said that, it might be considered more "standard" to use cURL, and this will certainly give you more control:
$url = 'http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&titles=Your_Highness&prop=revisions&rvprop=content&rvsection=0';
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'MyBot/1.0 (http://www.mysite.com/)');
$result = curl_exec($ch);
if (!$result) {
exit('cURL Error: '.curl_error($ch));
}
var_dump($result);

Answer 2

The error message you are really receiving is
Scripts should use an informative User-Agent string with contact information, or they may be IP-blocked without notice.
This means that you should provide additional details about yourself when using the API. Your usage of file_get_contents does send the required User-Agent.
Here is a working example in curl that identifies itself as a Test for this question:
<?php
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&titles=Your_Highness&prop=revisions&rvprop=content&rvsection=0&format=xml");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Testing for http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8956331/how-to-get-results-from-the-wikipedia-api-with-php");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
echo $result;
?>

Answer 3

file_get_contents Should work.
file_get_contents('http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=revisions&titles=New_York_Yankees&rvprop=timestamp|user|comment|content')
This was previously discussed on stackoverflow here
Also, some nice looking code samples here

Answer 4

They themselves say in their API documentation:
Use any programming language to make an HTTP GET request for that URL
You need to get the URL right, thefollowing worksfor me :
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?format=json&action=query&titles=Main%20Page&prop=revisions&rvprop=content
you are not specifying the output format as far as I can notice right now!