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.

METHODS

new()

The constructor, which ordinarily takes no arguments.

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

WWW::Wikipedia uses LWP::UserAgent to to talk to the Wikipedia. If you would like to have more control over the user agent (control timeouts, proxies ...) you can pass in a user agent for WWW::Wikipedia to use.

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new();
$ua->timeout( 2 );

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

search()

Which performs the search and returns a WWW::Wikipedia::Entry object which you can query further.

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

text()

After you have performed a search you use text() to retrieve the text of the entry. If your search failed you will be returned undef.

$entry = $wiki->search( 'Perl' );
print "Perl is: ",$entry->text();

related()

related() returns a list of wiki items that are related to the entry in question. You can use these terms as possible new searches. If there are no realted items you get back an empty list.

    $entry = $wiki->search( 'Perl' );
    foreach ( $wiki->related() ) { 
	print "$_\n";
    }

    ## which prints out this:

    1987
    2002
    Acronym
    Artistic License
    Awk
    Backronym
    C programming language
    CPAN
    Common Gateway Interface
    Free software movement
    Functional programming
    GPL
    Java programming language
    Larry Wall
    Microsoft Windows
    Obfuscated code
    Object Oriented Programming
    Operating system
    Parrot virtual machine
    Poetry
    Procedural programming
    Programming language
    Regular expression
    Scripting programming languages
    Sed
    Sh
    Syntax
    Unicode
    Unix
    Unix-like
    Virtual machine
    Wikipedia

TODO

• Clean up results

• Support for other language Wikipedias

• Handle failed searches by suggesting other entries?

SEE ALSO

• HTML::Parser

• LWP::UserAgent

AUTHOR

Ed Summers, <esummers@flr.follett.com>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright 2003 by Ed Summers

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