Fetch the description from wikipedia from an article - php

Question

I am trying to make a API call to wikipedia through: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=parse&page=Petunia&format=xml, but the xml is full with html and css tags.
Is there a way to fetch only plain text without tags? Thanks!
*Edit 1:
$json = json_decode(file_get_contents('http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=parse&page=Petunia&format=json'));
$txt = strip_tags($json->text);
var_dump($json);
Null displayed.

Answer 1

Question was partially answered here
$url = 'http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=parse&page=Petunia&format=json&prop=text';
$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "TestScript"); // required by wikipedia.org server
$c = curl_exec($ch);
$json = json_decode($c);
var_dump(strip_tags($json->{'parse'}->{'text'}->{'*'}))
I was not able to use file_get_contents but it works fine with cURL.

Answer 2

it is possible to fetch info or description from wikipedia by using xml.
$url = "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=opensearch&search=".$term."&format=xml&limit=1";
$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPGET, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, FALSE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, false); // Include head as needed
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, FALSE); // Return body
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, FALSE); // Minimize logs
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, ""); // Referer value
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE); // No certificate
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, TRUE); // Follow redirects
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS, 4); // Limit redirections to four
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE); // Return in string
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; he; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100722 Firefox/3.6.8"); // Webbot name
$page = curl_exec($ch);
$xml = simplexml_load_string($page);
if((string)$xml->Section->Item->Description) {
print_r(array((string)$xml->Section->Item->Text,
(string)$xml->Section->Item->Description,
(string)$xml->Section->Item->Url));
} else {
echo "sorry";
}
But curl must be install on server... have a nice day...