NAME

Parse::MediaWikiDump::Revisions - Object capable of processing dump files with multiple revisions per article

ABOUT

This object is used to access the metadata associated with a MediaWiki instance and provide an iterative interface for extracting the indidivual article revisions out of the same. To gurantee that there is only a single revision per article use the Parse::MediaWikiDump::Revisions object.

SYNOPSIS

$pmwd = Parse::MediaWikiDump->new;
$revisions = $pmwd->revisions('pages-articles.xml');
$revisions = $pmwd->revisions(\*FILEHANDLE);

#print the title and id of each article inside the dump file
while(defined($page = $revisions->next)) {
  print "title '", $page->title, "' id ", $page->id, "\n";
}

METHODS

$revisions->new

Open the specified MediaWiki dump file. If the single argument to this method is a string it will be used as the path to the file to open. If the argument is a reference to a filehandle the contents will be read from the filehandle as specified.

$revisions->next

Returns an instance of the next available Parse::MediaWikiDump::page object or returns undef if there are no more articles left.

$revisions->version

Returns a plain text string of the dump file format revision number

$revisions->sitename

Returns a plain text string that is the name of the MediaWiki instance.

$revisions->base

Returns the URL to the instances main article in the form of a string.

$revisions->generator

Returns a string containing 'MediaWiki' and a version number of the instance that dumped this file. Example: 'MediaWiki 1.14alpha'

$revisions->case

Returns a string describing the case sensitivity configured in the instance.

$revisions->namespaces

Returns a reference to an array of references. Each reference is to another array with the first item being the unique identifier of the namespace and the second element containing a string that is the name of the namespace.

$revisions->namespaces_names

Returns an array reference the array contains strings of all the namespaces each as an element.

$revisions->current_byte

Returns the number of bytes that has been processed so far

$revisions->size

Returns the total size of the dump file in bytes.

EXAMPLE

Extract the article text of each revision of an article using a given title

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Parse::MediaWikiDump;

my $file = shift(@ARGV) or die "must specify a MediaWiki dump of the current pages";
my $title = shift(@ARGV) or die "must specify an article title";
my $pmwd = Parse::MediaWikiDump->new;
my $dump = $pmwd->revisions($file);
my $found = 0;

binmode(STDOUT, ':utf8');
binmode(STDERR, ':utf8');

#this is the only currently known value but there could be more in the future
if ($dump->case ne 'first-letter') {
  die "unable to handle any case setting besides 'first-letter'";
}

$title = case_fixer($title);

while(my $revision = $dump->next) {
  if ($revision->title eq $title) {
    print STDERR "Located text for $title revision ", $revision->revision_id, "\n";
    my $text = $revision->text;
    print $$text;
    
    $found = 1;
  }
}

print STDERR "Unable to find article text for $title\n" unless $found;
exit 1;

#removes any case sensativity from the very first letter of the title
#but not from the optional namespace name
sub case_fixer {
  my $title = shift;

  #check for namespace
  if ($title =~ /^(.+?):(.+)/) {
    $title = $1 . ':' . ucfirst($2);
  } else {
    $title = ucfirst($title);
  }

  return $title;
}

LIMITATIONS

Version 0.4

This class was updated to support version 0.4 dump files from a MediaWiki instance but it does not currently support any of the new information available in those files.