NAME

WWW::Wikipedia - Automated interface to the Wikipedia

SYNOPSIS

  use WWW::Wikipedia;
  my $wiki = WWW::Wikipedia->new();

  ## search for 'perl' 
  my $result = $wiki->search( 'perl' );

  ## if the entry has some text print it out
  if ( $result->text() ) { 
      print $result->text();
  }

  ## list any related items we can look up 
  print join( "\n", $result->related() );

DESCRIPTION

WWW::Wikipedia provides an automated interface to the Wikipedia <http://www.wikipedia.org>, which is a free, collaborative, online encyclopedia. This module allows you to search for a topic and return the resulting entry. It also gives you access to related topics which are also available via the Wikipedia for that entry.

INSTALLATION

To install this module type the following:

    perl Makefile.PL
    make
    make test
    make install

METHODS

new()

The constructor. You can pass it a two letter language code, or nothing to let it default to 'en'.

    ## Default: English
    my $wiki = WWW::Wikipedia->new();

    ## use the French wiki instead
    my $wiki = WWW::Wikipedia->new( language => 'fr' );

WWW::Wikipedia is a subclass of LWP::UserAgent. If you would like to have more control over the user agent (control timeouts, proxies ...) you have full access.

    ## set HTTP request timeout
    my $wiki = WWW::Wikipedia->new();
    $wiki->timeout( 2 );

You can turn off the following of wikipedia redirect directives by passing a false value to "follow_redirects".

Together with the Wiki markup, some entries include HTML tags. They can be stripped out using the "clean_html" option:

   my $wiki = WWW::Wikipedia->new( clean_html => 1 );

See "clean_html" documentation below for details.

language()

This allows you to get and set the language you want to use. Two letter language codes should be used. The default is 'en'.

    my $wiki = WWW::Wikipedia->new( language => 'es' );
    
    # Later on...
    $wiki->language( 'fr' );

clean_html()

Allows you to get/set if HTML is being stripped out.

    # set HTML strip
    $wiki->clean_html( 1 );

This option removes all tags and attributes they might have. Their contents, however, is maintained (for now). Comments are also removed.

follow_redirects()

By default, wikipeda redirect directives are followed. Set this to false to turn that off.

search()

Which performs the search and returns a WWW::Wikipedia::Entry object which you can query further. See WWW::Wikipedia::Entry docs for more info.

    $entry = $wiki->search( 'Perl' );
    print $entry->text();

If there's a problem connecting to Wikipedia, "undef" will be returned and the error message will be stored in "error()".

random()

This method fetches a random wikipedia page.

error()

This is a generic error accessor/mutator. You can retrieve any searching error messages here.

TODO

Be more specific on the HTML clean methodology. For now all tags are removed, keeping only their contents. In the future the behaviour might change accordingly with each specific tag.
Watch the development of Special:Export XML formatting, eg: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Export/perl

REPOSITORY

<https://github.com/edsu/www-wikipedia>

AUTHORS

Ed Summers <ehs@pobox.com>

Brian Cassidy <bricas@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.