How do I get information from wikipedia into my application - php

Question

Hi guys I wish to get information for entries I have in my database from wikipedia like for example some stadiums and country information. I'm using Zend Framework and also how would I be able to handle queries that return multiple ambiguous entries or the like.. I would like all the help I can get here...

Answer 1

Wikipedia is based on MediaWiki, offering an Application Programmable Interface (API).
You can check out MediaWiki API on Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php
Documentation for MediaWiki API - http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API

Answer 2

Do a simple HTTP request to the article you are looking to import. Here's a good library which might help with parsing the HTML, though there are dozens of solutions for that as well, including using the standard DOM model which is provided by php.
<?php
require_once "HTTP/Request.php";
$req =& new HTTP_Request("http://www.yahoo.com/");
if (!PEAR::isError($req->sendRequest())) {
echo $req->getResponseBody();
}
?>
Note, you will be locked out of the site if your traffic levels are deemed too high. (If you want a HUGE number of articles, download the database)

Answer 3

This blog has a really good code for get a definition from wiki
<?php
//FUNCTION THAT :PARAMETER - KEYWORD , AND RETURNS WIKI DEFINITION (IN ARRAY FORMAT)
function wikidefinition($s) {
//ENGLISH WIKI
$url = "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=opensearch&search=".urlencode($s)."&format=xml&limit=1";
$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPGET, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, FALSE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, FALSE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, FALSE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, "");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS, 4);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; he; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100722 Firefox/3.6.8");
$page = curl_exec($ch);
$xml = simplexml_load_string($page);
if((string)$xml->Section->Item->Description) {
return array((string)$xml->Section->Item->Text,
(string)$xml->Section->Item->Description,
(string)$xml->Section->Item->Url);
} else {
return "";
}
}
//END OF FUNCTION WIKIDEFINITIONS
//USE OF FUNCTION
$data = wikidefinition('Bangladesh') ;
//var_dump( wikidefinition('bangladesh') ) ; //displays the array content
echo "Word:" . $data[0] . "<br/>";
echo "Definition:" . $data[1] . "<br/>";
echo "Link:" . $data[2] . "<br/>";
?>