/ 
WWW-Wikipedia-1.96
River stage one • 1 direct dependent • 1 total dependent
/ WWW::Wikipedia

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.

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' );

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

  • Clean up results. Strip HTML.

  • Watch the development of Special:Export XML formatting, eg: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Export/perl

SEE ALSO

  • LWP::UserAgent

AUTHORS

Ed Summers <ehs@pobox.com>

Brian Cassidy <bricas@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright 2003-2009 by Ed Summers

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