/ 
WWW-Wikipedia-0.9
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.

METHODS

new()

The constructor, which takes no arguments.

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

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 );

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();

TODO

  • Clean up results

  • Support for other language Wikipedias

  • Handle failed searches by suggesting other entries?

SEE ALSO

  • 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.